to
live with ideas which would once have been intolerable to her.

To Gerty Farish, keeping watch over her with a tenderer if less
discerning eye than Mrs. Fisher's, the results of the struggle were
already distinctly visible. She did not, indeed, know what hostages Lily
had already given to expediency; but she saw her passionately and
irretrievably pledged to the ruinous policy of "keeping up." Gerty could
smile now at her own early dream of her friend's renovation through
adversity: she understood clearly enough that Lily was not of those to
whom privation teaches the unimportance of what they have lost. But this
very fact, to Gerty, made her friend the more piteously in want of aid,
the more exposed to the claims of a tenderness she was so little
conscious of needing.

Lily, since her return to town, had not often climbed Miss Farish's
stairs. There was something irritating to her in the mute interrogation
of Gerty's sympathy: she felt the real difficulties of her situation to
be incommunicable to any one whose theory of values was so different from
her own, and the restrictions of Gerty's life, which had once had the
charm of contrast, now reminded her too painfully of the limits to which
her own existence was shrinking. When at length, one afternoon, she put
into execution the belated resolve to visit her friend, this sense of
shrunken opportunities possessed her with unusual intensity. The walk up
Fifth Avenue, unfolding before her, in the brilliance of the hard winter
sunlight, an interminable procession of fastidiously-equipped
carriages--giving her, through the little squares of brougham-windows,
peeps of familiar profiles bent above visiting-lists, of hurried hands
dispensing notes and cards to attendant footmen--this glimpse of the
ever-revolving wheels of the great social machine made Lily more than
ever conscious of the steepness and narrowness of Gerty's stairs, and of
the cramped blind alley of life to which they led. Dull stairs destined
to be mounted by dull people: how many thousands of insignificant figures
were going up and down such stairs all over the world at that very
moment--figures as shabby and uninteresting as that of the middle-aged
lady in limp black who descended Gerty's flight as Lily climbed to it!

"That was poor Miss Jane Silverton--she came to talk things over with me:
she and her sister want to do something to support themselves," Gerty
explained, as Lily followed her into