buying them.

Chapter 10

The autumn dragged on monotonously. Miss Bart had received one or two
notes from Judy Trenor, reproaching her for not returning to Bellomont;
but she replied evasively, alleging the obligation to remain with her
aunt. In truth, however, she was fast wearying of her solitary existence
with Mrs. Peniston, and only the excitement of spending her
newly-acquired money lightened the dulness of the days.

All her life Lily had seen money go out as quickly as it came in, and
whatever theories she cultivated as to the prudence of setting aside a
part of her gains, she had unhappily no saving vision of the risks of the
opposite course. It was a keen satisfaction to feel that, for a few
months at least, she would be independent of her friends' bounty, that
she could show herself abroad without wondering whether some penetrating
eye would detect in her dress the traces of Judy Trenor's refurbished
splendour. The fact that the money freed her temporarily from all minor
obligations obscured her sense of the greater one it represented, and
having never before known what it was to command so large a sum, she
lingered delectably over the amusement of spending it.

It was on one of these occasions that, leaving a shop where she had spent
an hour of deliberation over a dressing-case of the most complicated
elegance, she ran across Miss Farish, who had entered the same
establishment with the modest object of having her watch repaired. Lily
was feeling unusually virtuous. She had decided to defer the purchase of
the dressing-case till she should receive the bill for her new
opera-cloak, and the resolve made her feel much richer than when she had
entered the shop. In this mood of self-approval she had a sympathetic eye
for others, and she was struck by her friend's air of dejection.

Miss Farish, it appeared, had just left the committee-meeting of a
struggling charity in which she was interested. The object of the
association was to provide comfortable lodgings, with a reading-room and
other modest distractions, where young women of the class employed in
down town offices might find a home when out of work, or in need of rest,
and the first year's financial report showed so deplorably small a
balance that Miss Farish, who was convinced of the urgency of the work,
felt proportionately discouraged by the small amount of interest it
aroused. The other-regarding sentiments had not been cultivated in Lily,
and