Gerty had always been a parasite
in the moral order, living on the crumbs of other tables, and content to
look through the window at the banquet spread for her friends. Now that
she was enjoying a little private feast of her own, it would have seemed
incredibly selfish not to lay a plate for a friend; and there was no one
with whom she would rather have shared her enjoyment than Miss Bart.

As to the nature of Selden's growing kindness, Gerty would no more have
dared to define it than she would have tried to learn a butterfly's
colours by knocking the dust from its wings. To seize on the wonder would
be to brush off its bloom, and perhaps see it fade and stiffen in her
hand: better the sense of beauty palpitating out of reach, while she held
her breath and watched where it would alight. Yet Selden's manner at the
Brys' had brought the flutter of wings so close that they seemed to be
beating in her own heart. She had never seen him so alert, so responsive,
so attentive to what she had to say. His habitual manner had an
absent-minded kindliness which she accepted, and was grateful for, as the
liveliest sentiment her presence was likely to inspire; but she was quick
to feel in him a change implying that for once she could give pleasure as
well as receive it.

And it was so delightful that this higher degree of sympathy should be
reached through their interest in Lily Bart!

Gerty's affection for her friend--a sentiment that had learned to keep
itself alive on the scantiest diet--had grown to active adoration since
Lily's restless curiosity had drawn her into the circle of Miss Farish's
work. Lily's taste of beneficence had wakened in her a momentary appetite
for well-doing. Her visit to the Girls' Club had first brought her in
contact with the dramatic contrasts of life. She had always accepted with
philosophic calm the fact that such existences as hers were pedestalled
on foundations of obscure humanity. The dreary limbo of dinginess lay all
around and beneath that little illuminated circle in which life reached
its finest efflorescence, as the mud and sleet of a winter night enclose
a hot-house filled with tropical flowers. All this was in the natural
order of things, and the orchid basking in its artificially created
atmosphere could round the delicate curves of its petals undisturbed by
the ice on the panes.

But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract conception of
poverty, another to be brought in co