ess
failed before the difficulty of discovering a workable vein in the vague
wealth of Lily's graces. Mrs. Fisher was full of indirect expedients for
enabling her friends to earn a living, and could conscientiously assert
that she had put several opportunities of this kind before Lily; but more
legitimate methods of bread-winning were as much out of her line as they
were beyond the capacity of the sufferers she was generally called upon
to assist. Lily's failure to profit by the chances already afforded her
might, moreover, have justified the abandonment of farther effort on her
behalf; but Mrs. Fisher's inexhaustible good-nature made her an adept at
creating artificial demands in response to an actual supply. In the
pursuance of this end she at once started on a voyage of discovery in
Miss Bart's behalf; and as the result of her explorations she now
summoned the latter with the announcement that she had "found something."

Left to herself, Gerty mused distressfully upon her friend's plight, and
her own inability to relieve it. It was clear to her that Lily, for the
present, had no wish for the kind of help she could give. Miss Farish
could see no hope for her friend but in a life completely reorganized and
detached from its old associations; whereas all Lily's energies were
centred in the determined effort to hold fast to those associations, to
keep herself visibly identified with them, as long as the illusion could
be maintained. Pitiable as such an attitude seemed to Gerty, she could
not judge it as harshly as Selden, for instance, might have done. She had
not forgotten the night of emotion when she and Lily had lain in each
other's arms, and she had seemed to feel her very heart's blood passing
into her friend. The sacrifice she had made had seemed unavailing enough;
no trace remained in Lily of the subduing influences of that hour; but
Gerty's tenderness, disciplined by long years of contact with obscure and
inarticulate suffering, could wait on its object with a silent
forbearance which took no account of time. She could not, however, deny
herself the solace of taking anxious counsel with Lawrence Selden, with
whom, since his return from Europe, she had renewed her old relation of
cousinly confidence.

Selden himself had never been aware of any change in their relation. He
found Gerty as he had left her, simple, undemanding and devoted, but with
a quickened intelligence of the heart which he recognized witho