ed ill for that lady's prospect of succeeding to
the black brocade; but minds impenetrable to reason have generally some
crack through which suspicion filters, and her visitor's insinuations did
not glide off as easily as she had expected. Mrs. Peniston disliked
scenes, and her determination to avoid them had always led her to hold
herself aloof from the details of Lily's life. In her youth, girls had
not been supposed to require close supervision. They were generally
assumed to be taken up with the legitimate business of courtship and
marriage, and interference in such affairs on the part of their natural
guardians was considered as unwarrantable as a spectator's suddenly
joining in a game. There had of course been "fast" girls even in Mrs.
Peniston's early experience; but their fastness, at worst, was understood
to be a mere excess of animal spirits, against which there could be no
graver charge than that of being "unladylike." The modern fastness
appeared synonymous with immorality, and the mere idea of immorality was
as offensive to Mrs. Peniston as a smell of cooking in the drawing-room:
it was one of the conceptions her mind refused to admit.

She had no immediate intention of repeating to Lily what she had heard,
or even of trying to ascertain its truth by means of discreet
interrogation. To do so might be to provoke a scene; and a scene, in the
shaken state of Mrs. Peniston's nerves, with the effects of her dinner
not worn off, and her mind still tremulous with new impressions, was a
risk she deemed it her duty to avoid. But there remained in her thoughts
a settled deposit of resentment against her niece, all the denser because
it was not to be cleared by explanation or discussion. It was horrible
of a young girl to let herself be talked about; however unfounded the
charges against her, she must be to blame for their having been made.
Mrs. Peniston felt as if there had been a contagious illness in the
house, and she was doomed to sit shivering among her contaminated
furniture.

Chapter 12

Miss Bart had in fact been treading a devious way, and none of her
critics could have been more alive to the fact than herself; but she had
a fatalistic sense of being drawn from one wrong turning to another,
without ever perceiving the right road till it was too late to take it.

Lily, who considered herself above narrow prejudices, had not imagined
that the fact of letting Gus Trenor make a little money for her wo