f sentimental fiction, and she could not help thinking that
the possession of such tastes ennobled her desire for worldly advantages.
She would not indeed have cared to marry a man who was merely rich: she
was secretly ashamed of her mother's crude passion for money. Lily's
preference would have been for an English nobleman with political
ambitions and vast estates; or, for second choice, an Italian prince with
a castle in the Apennines and an hereditary office in the Vatican. Lost
causes had a romantic charm for her, and she liked to picture herself as
standing aloof from the vulgar press of the Quirinal, and sacrificing her
pleasure to the claims of an immemorial tradition. . . .

How long ago and how far off it all seemed! Those ambitions were hardly
more futile and childish than the earlier ones which had centred about
the possession of a French jointed doll with real hair. Was it only ten
years since she had wavered in imagination between the English earl and
the Italian prince? Relentlessly her mind travelled on over the dreary
interval. . . .

After two years of hungry roaming Mrs. Bart had died----died of a deep
disgust. She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be dingy. Her
visions of a brilliant marriage for Lily had faded after the first year.

"People can't marry you if they don't see you--and how can they see you
in these holes where we're stuck?" That was the burden of her lament; and
her last adjuration to her daughter was to escape from dinginess if she
could.

"Don't let it creep up on you and drag you down. Fight your way out of it
somehow--you're young and can do it," she insisted.

She had died during one of their brief visits to New York, and there Lily
at once became the centre of a family council composed of the wealthy
relatives whom she had been taught to despise for living like pigs. It
may be that they had an inkling of the sentiments in which she had been
brought up, for none of them manifested a very lively desire for her
company; indeed, the question threatened to remain unsolved till Mrs.
Peniston with a sigh announced: "I'll try her for a year."

Every one was surprised, but one and all concealed their surprise, lest
Mrs. Peniston should be alarmed by it into reconsidering her decision.

Mrs. Peniston was Mr. Bart's widowed sister, and if she was by no means
the richest of the family group, its other members nevertheless abounded
in reasons why she was clearly destined by Pr