ntact with its human embodiments.
Lily had never conceived of these victims of fate otherwise than in the
mass. That the mass was composed of individual lives, innumerable
separate centres of sensation, with her own eager reachings for pleasure,
her own fierce revulsions from pain--that some of these bundles of
feeling were clothed in shapes not so unlike her own, with eyes meant to
look on gladness, and young lips shaped for love--this discovery gave
Lily one of those sudden shocks of pity that sometimes decentralize a
life. Lily's nature was incapable of such renewal: she could feel other
demands only through her own, and no pain was long vivid which did not
press on an answering nerve. But for the moment she was drawn out of
herself by the interest of her direct relation with a world so unlike her
own. She had supplemented her first gift by personal assistance to one or
two of Miss Farish's most appealing subjects, and the admiration and
interest her presence excited among the tired workers at the club
ministered in a new form to her insatiable desire to please.

Gerty Farish was not a close enough reader of character to disentangle
the mixed threads of which Lily's philanthropy was woven. She supposed
her beautiful friend to be actuated by the same motive as herself--that
sharpening of the moral vision which makes all human suffering so near
and insistent that the other aspects of life fade into remoteness. Gerty
lived by such simple formulas that she did not hesitate to class her
friend's state with the emotional "change of heart" to which her dealings
with the poor had accustomed her; and she rejoiced in the thought that
she had been the humble instrument of this renewal. Now she had an answer
to all criticisms of Lily's conduct: as she had said, she knew "the real
Lily," and the discovery that Selden shared her knowledge raised her
placid acceptance of life to a dazzled sense of its possibilities--a
sense farther enlarged, in the course of the afternoon, by the receipt of
a telegram from Selden asking if he might dine with her that evening.

While Gerty was lost in the happy bustle which this announcement produced
in her small household, Selden was at one with her in thinking with
intensity of Lily Bart. The case which had called him to Albany was not
complicated enough to absorb all his attention, and he had the
professional faculty of keeping a part of his mind free when its services
were not needed. This part