er situation--but the agent, he's dead against us. It ain't no
fault of ours, neither, but----"

At this point Lily's impatience overcame her. "If you have anything to
say to me----" she interposed.

The woman's resentment of the rebuff seemed to spur her lagging ideas.

"Yes, Miss; I'm coming to that," she said. She paused again, with her
eyes on Lily, and then continued, in a tone of diffuse narrative: "When
we was at the Benedick I had charge of some of the gentlemen's rooms;
leastways, I swep' 'em out on Saturdays. Some of the gentlemen got the
greatest sight of letters: I never saw the like of it. Their waste-paper
baskets 'd be fairly brimming, and papers falling over on the floor.
Maybe havin' so many is how they get so careless. Some of 'em is worse
than others. Mr. Selden, Mr. Lawrence Selden, he was always one of the
carefullest: burnt his letters in winter, and tore 'em in little bits in
summer. But sometimes he'd have so many he'd just bunch 'em together, the
way the others did, and tear the lot through once--like this."

While she spoke she had loosened the string from the parcel in her hand,
and now she drew forth a letter which she laid on the table between Miss
Bart and herself. As she had said, the letter was torn in two; but with a
rapid gesture she laid the torn edges together and smoothed out the page.

A wave of indignation swept over Lily. She felt herself in the presence
of something vile, as yet but dimly conjectured--the kind of vileness of
which people whispered, but which she had never thought of as touching
her own life. She drew back with a motion of disgust, but her withdrawal
was checked by a sudden discovery: under the glare of Mrs. Peniston's
chandelier she had recognized the hand-writing of the letter. It was a
large disjointed hand, with a flourish of masculinity which but slightly
disguised its rambling weakness, and the words, scrawled in heavy ink on
pale-tinted notepaper, smote on Lily's ear as though she had heard them
spoken.

At first she did not grasp the full import of the situation. She
understood only that before her lay a letter written by Bertha Dorset,
and addressed, presumably, to Lawrence Selden. There was no date, but the
blackness of the ink proved the writing to be comparatively recent. The
packet in Mrs. Haffen's hand doubtless contained more letters of the same
kind--a dozen, Lily conjectured from its thickness. The letter before her
was short, but its few w