him to live quietly
with the thought of Lily Bart. To hear that she was in need of help--even
such vague help as he could offer--was to be at once repossessed by that
thought; and by the time he reached the street he had sufficiently
convinced himself of the urgency of his cousin's appeal to turn his steps
directly toward Lily's hotel.

There his zeal met a check in the unforeseen news that Miss Bart had
moved away; but, on his pressing his enquiries, the clerk remembered that
she had left an address, for which he presently began to search through
his books.

It was certainly strange that she should have taken this step without
letting Gerty Farish know of her decision; and Selden waited with a vague
sense of uneasiness while the address was sought for. The process lasted
long enough for uneasiness to turn to apprehension; but when at length a
slip of paper was handed him, and he read on it: "Care of Mrs. Norma
Hatch, Emporium Hotel," his apprehension passed into an incredulous
stare, and this into the gesture of disgust with which he tore the paper
in two, and turned to walk quickly homeward.

Chapter 9

When Lily woke on the morning after her translation to the Emporium
Hotel, her first feeling was one of purely physical satisfaction. The
force of contrast gave an added keenness to the luxury of lying once more
in a soft-pillowed bed, and looking across a spacious sunlit room at a
breakfast-table set invitingly near the fire. Analysis and introspection
might come later; but for the moment she was not even troubled by the
excesses of the upholstery or the restless convolutions of the furniture.
The sense of being once more lapped and folded in ease, as in some dense
mild medium impenetrable to discomfort, effectually stilled the faintest
note of criticism.

When, the afternoon before, she had presented herself to the lady to whom
Carry Fisher had directed her, she had been conscious of entering a new
world. Carry's vague presentment of Mrs. Norma Hatch (whose reversion to
her Christian name was explained as the result of her latest divorce),
left her under the implication of coming "from the West," with the not
unusual extenuation of having brought a great deal of money with her. She
was, in short, rich, helpless, unplaced: the very subject for Lily's
hand. Mrs. Fisher had not specified the line her friend was to take; she
owned herself unacquainted with Mrs. Hatch, whom she "knew about" through
Melville Stan