a kind of passion, as though it were some
weapon she had slowly fashioned for her vengeance. It was the last asset
in their fortunes, the nucleus around which their life was to be rebuilt.
She watched it jealously, as though it were her own property and Lily its
mere custodian; and she tried to instil into the latter a sense of the
responsibility that such a charge involved. She followed in imagination
the career of other beauties, pointing out to her daughter what might be
achieved through such a gift, and dwelling on the awful warning of those
who, in spite of it, had failed to get what they wanted: to Mrs. Bart,
only stupidity could explain the lamentable denouement of some of her
examples. She was not above the inconsistency of charging fate, rather
than herself, with her own misfortunes; but she inveighed so
acrimoniously against love-matches that Lily would have fancied her own
marriage had been of that nature, had not Mrs. Bart frequently assured
her that she had been "talked into it"--by whom, she never made clear.

Lily was duly impressed by the magnitude of her opportunities. The
dinginess of her present life threw into enchanting relief the existence
to which she felt herself entitled. To a less illuminated intelligence
Mrs. Bart's counsels might have been dangerous; but Lily understood that
beauty is only the raw material of conquest, and that to convert it into
success other arts are required. She knew that to betray any sense of
superiority was a subtler form of the stupidity her mother denounced, and
it did not take her long to learn that a beauty needs more tact than the
possessor of an average set of features.

Her ambitions were not as crude as Mrs. Bart's. It had been among that
lady's grievances that her husband--in the early days, before he was too
tired--had wasted his evenings in what she vaguely described as "reading
poetry"; and among the effects packed off to auction after his death were
a score or two of dingy volumes which had struggled for existence among
the boots and medicine bottles of his dressing-room shelves. There was in
Lily a vein of sentiment, perhaps transmitted from this source, which
gave an idealizing touch to her most prosaic purposes. She liked to think
of her beauty as a power for good, as giving her the opportunity to
attain a position where she should make her influence felt in the vague
diffusion of refinement and good taste. She was fond of pictures and
flowers, and o