d to help me.
He told me--he warned me long ago--he foresaw that I should grow hateful
to myself!"

The name, as Gerty saw with a clutch at the heart, had loosened the
springs of self-pity in her friend's dry breast, and tear by tear Lily
poured out the measure of her anguish. She had dropped sideways in
Gerty's big arm-chair, her head buried where lately Selden's had leaned,
in a beauty of abandonment that drove home to Gerty's aching senses the
inevitableness of her own defeat. Ah, it needed no deliberate purpose on
Lily's part to rob her of her dream! To look on that prone loveliness was
to see in it a natural force, to recognize that love and power belong to
such as Lily, as renunciation and service are the lot of those they
despoil. But if Selden's infatuation seemed a fatal necessity, the effect
that his name produced shook Gerty's steadfastness with a last pang. Men
pass through such superhuman loves and outlive them: they are the
probation subduing the heart to human joys. How gladly Gerty would have
welcomed the ministry of healing: how willingly have soothed the sufferer
back to tolerance of life! But Lily's self-betrayal took this last hope
from her. The mortal maid on the shore is helpless against the siren who
loves her prey: such victims are floated back dead from their adventure.

Lily sprang up and caught her with strong hands. "Gerty, you know
him--you understand him--tell me; if I went to him, if I told him
everything--if I said: 'I am bad through and through--I want admiration,
I want excitement, I want money--' yes, MONEY! That's my shame,
Gerty--and it's known, it's said of me--it's what men think of me--If I
said it all to him--told him the whole story--said plainly: 'I've sunk
lower than the lowest, for I've taken what they take, and not paid as
they pay'--oh, Gerty, you know him, you can speak for him: if I told him
everything would he loathe me? Or would he pity me, and understand me,
and save me from loathing myself?"

Gerty stood cold and passive. She knew the hour of her probation had
come, and her poor heart beat wildly against its destiny. As a dark river
sweeps by under a lightning flash, she saw her chance of happiness surge
past under a flash of temptation. What prevented her from saying: "He is
like other men?" She was not so sure of him, after all! But to do so
would have been like blaspheming her love. She could not put him before
herself in any light but the noblest: she must tru