e poor Mattie thinks it natural enough that she should be
singled out--I've no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the
anaconda. Well, you know I've always told you that Mattie secretly longed
to bore herself with the really fashionable; and now that the chance has
come, I see that she's capable of sacrificing all her old friends to it."

Lily laid aside her brush and turned a penetrating glance upon her
friend. "Including ME?" she suggested.

"Ah, my dear," murmured Mrs. Fisher, rising to push back a log from the
hearth.

"That's what Bertha means, isn't it?" Miss Bart went on steadily. "For
of course she always means something; and before I left Long Island I saw
that she was beginning to lay her toils for Mattie."

Mrs. Fisher sighed evasively. "She has her fast now, at any rate. To
think of that loud independence of Mattie's being only a subtler form of
snobbishness! Bertha can already make her believe anything she
pleases--and I'm afraid she's begun, my poor child, by insinuating
horrors about you."

Lily flushed under the shadow of her drooping hair. "The world is too
vile," she murmured, averting herself from Mrs. Fisher's anxious scrutiny.

"It's not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it is to
fight it on its own terms--and above all, my dear, not alone!" Mrs.
Fisher gathered up her floating implications in a resolute grasp.
"You've told me so little that I can only guess what has been happening;
but in the rush we all live in there's no time to keep on hating any one
without a cause, and if Bertha is still nasty enough to want to injure
you with other people it must be because she's still afraid of you. From
her standpoint there's only one reason for being afraid of you; and my
own idea is that, if you want to punish her, you hold the means in your
hand. I believe you can marry George Dorset tomorrow; but if you don't
care for that particular form of retaliation, the only thing to save you
from Bertha is to marry somebody else."

Chapter 7

The light projected on the situation by Mrs. Fisher had the cheerless
distinctness of a winter dawn. It outlined the facts with a cold
precision unmodified by shade or colour, and refracted, as it were, from
the blank walls of the surrounding limitations: she had opened windows
from which no sky was ever visible. But the idealist subdued to vulgar
necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he
cannot sto