er recognized society. But
strangest of all to Lily was the encounter, in this latter group, of
several of her acquaintances. She had supposed, and not without relief,
that she was passing, for the moment, completely out of her own circle;
but she found that Mr. Stancy, one side of whose sprawling existence
overlapped the edge of Mrs. Fisher's world, had drawn several of its
brightest ornaments into the circle of the Emporium. To find Ned
Silverton among the habitual frequenters of Mrs. Hatch's drawing-room was
one of Lily's first astonishments; but she soon discovered that he was
not Mr. Stancy's most important recruit. It was on little Freddy Van
Osburgh, the small slim heir of the Van Osburgh millions, that the
attention of Mrs. Hatch's group was centred. Freddy, barely out of
college, had risen above the horizon since Lily's eclipse, and she now
saw with surprise what an effulgence he shed on the outer twilight of
Mrs. Hatch's existence. This, then, was one of the things that young men
"went in" for when released from the official social routine; this was
the kind of "previous engagement" that so frequently caused them to
disappoint the hopes of anxious hostesses. Lily had an odd sense of being
behind the social tapestry, on the side where the threads were knotted
and the loose ends hung. For a moment she found a certain amusement in
the show, and in her own share of it: the situation had an ease and
unconventionality distinctly refreshing after her experience of the irony
of conventions. But these flashes of amusement were but brief reactions
from the long disgust of her days. Compared with the vast gilded void of
Mrs. Hatch's existence, the life of Lily's former friends seemed packed
with ordered activities. Even the most irresponsible pretty woman of her
acquaintance had her inherited obligations, her conventional
benevolences, her share in the working of the great civic machine; and
all hung together in the solidarity of these traditional functions. The
performance of specific duties would have simplified Miss Bart's
position; but the vague attendance on Mrs. Hatch was not without its
perplexities.

It was not her employer who created these perplexities. Mrs. Hatch showed
from the first an almost touching desire for Lily's approval. Far from
asserting the superiority of wealth, her beautiful eyes seemed to urge
the plea of inexperience: she wanted to do what was "nice," to be taught
how to be "lovely." The dif