d as she looked back
she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any real
relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless, blown hither and
thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal existence to
shelter them from its shifting gusts. She herself had grown up without
any one spot of earth being dearer to her than another: there was no
centre of early pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her
heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and
tenderness for others. In whatever form a slowly-accumulated past lives
in the blood--whether in the concrete image of the old house stored with
visual memories, or in the conception of the house not built with hands,
but made up of inherited passions and loyalties--it has the same power of
broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching it by
mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human striving.

Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to Lily.
She had had a premonition of it in the blind motions of her
mating-instinct; but they had been checked by the disintegrating
influences of the life about her. All the men and women she knew were
like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance:
her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening
in Nettie Struther's kitchen.

The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up the
fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them, seemed to
Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It was a meagre
enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant margin for
possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the frail audacious
permanence of a bird's nest built on the edge of a cliff--a mere wisp of
leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may
hang safely over the abyss.

Yes--but it had taken two to build the nest; the man's faith as well as
the woman's courage. Lily remembered Nettie's words: I KNEW HE KNEW ABOUT
ME. Her husband's faith in her had made her renewal possible--it is so
easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be!
Well--Selden had twice been ready to stake his faith on Lily Bart; but
the third trial had been too severe for his endurance. The very quality
of his love had made it the more impossible to recall to life. If it had
been a simple instinct of the blood, the power of her b