cy, a lawyer in his leisure moments, and the Falstaff of a
certain section of festive dub life. Socially, Mr. Stancy might have
been said to form a connecting link between the Gormer world and the more
dimly-lit region on which Miss Bart now found herself entering. It was,
however, only figuratively that the illumination of Mrs. Hatch's world
could be described as dim: in actual fact, Lily found her seated in a
blaze of electric light, impartially projected from various ornamental
excrescences on a vast concavity of pink damask and gilding, from which
she rose like Venus from her shell. The analogy was justified by the
appearance of the lady, whose large-eyed prettiness had the fixity of
something impaled and shown under glass. This did not preclude the
immediate discovery that she was some years younger than her visitor, and
that under her showiness, her ease, the aggression of her dress and
voice, there persisted that ineradicable innocence which, in ladies of
her nationality, so curiously coexists with startling extremes of
experience.

The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her as its
inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New
York hotel--a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with
mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements,
while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a
desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendour moved wan beings as
richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or
permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from
restaurant to concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from "art
exhibit" to dress-maker's opening. High-stepping horses or elaborately
equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan
distances, whence they returned, still more wan from the weight of their
sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the hotel routine.
Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives, there was
doubtless a real past, peopled by real human activities: they themselves
were probably the product of strong ambitions, persistent energies,
diversified contacts with the wholesome roughness of life; yet they had
no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.

Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering that Mrs.
Hatch was its most substantial figure. That lady, though still floa