m, Mrs. Fisher
seemed disposed to rest from her labours; and Lily, understanding the
reason, could not condemn her. Carry had in fact come dangerously near to
being involved in the episode of Mrs. Norma Hatch, and it had taken some
verbal ingenuity to extricate herself. She frankly owned to having
brought Lily and Mrs. Hatch together, but then she did not know Mrs.
Hatch--she had expressly warned Lily that she did not know Mrs.
Hatch--and besides, she was not Lily's keeper, and really the girl was
old enough to take care of herself. Carry did not put her own case so
brutally, but she allowed it to be thus put for her by her latest bosom
friend, Mrs. Jack Stepney: Mrs. Stepney, trembling over the narrowness of
her only brother's escape, but eager to vindicate Mrs. Fisher, at whose
house she could count on the "jolly parties" which had become a necessity
to her since marriage had emancipated her from the Van Osburgh point of
view.

Lily understood the situation and could make allowances for it. Carry
had been a good friend to her in difficult days, and perhaps only a
friendship like Gerty's could be proof against such an increasing strain.
Gerty's friendship did indeed hold fast; yet Lily was beginning to avoid
her also. For she could not go to Gerty's without risk of meeting Selden;
and to meet him now would be pure pain. It was pain enough even to think
of him, whether she considered him in the distinctness of her waking
thoughts, or felt the obsession of his presence through the blur of her
tormented nights. That was one of the reasons why she had turned again to
Mrs. Hatch's prescription. In the uneasy snatches of her natural dreams
he came to her sometimes in the old guise of fellowship and tenderness;
and she would rise from the sweet delusion mocked and emptied of her
courage. But in the sleep which the phial procured she sank far below
such half-waking visitations, sank into depths of dreamless annihilation
from which she woke each morning with an obliterated past.

Gradually, to be sure, the stress of the old thoughts would return; but
at least they did not importune her waking hour. The drug gave her a
momentary illusion of complete renewal, from which she drew strength to
take up her daily work. The strength was more and more needed as the
perplexities of her future increased. She knew that to Gerty and Mrs.
Fisher she was only passing through a temporary period of probation,
since they believed that the appr