creasing clearness
during the early weeks of the winter. Hitherto, she had kept up a
semblance of movement outside the main flow of the social current; but
with the return to town, and the concentrating of scattered activities,
the mere fact of not slipping back naturally into her old habits of life
marked her as being unmistakably excluded from them. If one were not a
part of the season's fixed routine, one swung unsphered in a void of
social non-existence. Lily, for all her dissatisfied dreaming, had never
really conceived the possibility of revolving about a different centre:
it was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find
any other habitable region. Her sense of irony never quite deserted her,
and she could still note, with self-directed derision, the abnormal value
suddenly acquired by the most tiresome and insignificant details of her
former life. Its very drudgeries had a charm now that she was
involuntarily released from them: card-leaving, note-writing, enforced
civilities to the dull and elderly, and the smiling endurance of tedious
dinners--how pleasantly such obligations would have filled the emptiness
of her days! She did indeed leave cards in plenty; she kept herself, with
a smiling and valiant persistence, well in the eye of her world; nor did
she suffer any of those gross rebuffs which sometimes produce a wholesome
reaction of contempt in their victim. Society did not turn away from her,
it simply drifted by, preoccupied and inattentive, letting her feel, to
the full measure of her humbled pride, how completely she had been the
creature of its favour.

She had rejected Rosedale's suggestion with a promptness of scorn almost
surprising to herself: she had not lost her capacity for high flashes of
indignation. But she could not breathe long on the heights; there had
been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength:
what she craved, and really felt herself entitled to, was a situation in
which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest. Hitherto her
intermittent impulses of resistance had sufficed to maintain her
self-respect. If she slipped she recovered her footing, and it was only
afterward that she was aware of having recovered it each time on a
slightly lower level. She had rejected Rosedale's offer without conscious
effort; her whole being had risen against it; and she did not yet
perceive that, by the mere act of listening to him, she had learned