uld spend all her money on dress, and
she supplemented the girl's scanty income by occasional "handsome
presents" meant to be applied to the same purpose. Lily, who was
intensely practical, would have preferred a fixed allowance; but Mrs.
Peniston liked the periodical recurrence of gratitude evoked by
unexpected cheques, and was perhaps shrewd enough to perceive that such a
method of giving kept alive in her niece a salutary sense of dependence.

Beyond this, Mrs. Peniston had not felt called upon to do anything for
her charge: she had simply stood aside and let her take the field. Lily
had taken it, at first with the confidence of assured possessorship, then
with gradually narrowing demands, till now she found herself actually
struggling for a foothold on the broad space which had once seemed her
own for the asking. How it happened she did not yet know. Sometimes she
thought it was because Mrs. Peniston had been too passive, and again she
feared it was because she herself had not been passive enough. Had she
shown an undue eagerness for victory? Had she lacked patience, pliancy
and dissimulation? Whether she charged herself with these faults or
absolved herself from them, made no difference in the sum-total of her
failure. Younger and plainer girls had been married off by dozens, and
she was nine-and-twenty, and still Miss Bart.

She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate, when she
longed to drop out of the race and make an independent life for herself.
But what manner of life would it be? She had barely enough money to pay
her dress-makers' bills and her gambling debts; and none of the desultory
interests which she dignified with the name of tastes was pronounced
enough to enable her to live contentedly in obscurity. Ah, no--she was
too intelligent not to be honest with herself. She knew that she hated
dinginess as much as her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she
meant to fight against it, dragging herself up again and again above its
flood till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented
such a slippery surface to her clutch.

Chapter 4

The next morning, on her breakfast tray, Miss Bart found a note from her
hostess.

"Dearest Lily," it ran, "if it is not too much of a bore to be down by
ten, will you come to my sitting-room to help me with some tiresome
things?"

Lily tossed aside the note and subsided on her pillows with a sigh. It
WAS a bore to be down by