“And at this hour of the day I don’t suppose you’ve a single one left, have you, Lily?” she plaintively concluded.
Miss Bart caught the startled glance of Mr. Percy Gryce, whose own lips were never defiled by tobacco.
“What an absurd question, Bertha!” she exclaimed, blushing at the thought of the store she had laid in at Lawrence Selden’s.
“Why, don’t you smoke? Since when have you given it up? What—you never—— And you don’t either, Mr. Gryce? Ah, of course—how stupid of me—I understand.”
And Mrs. Dorset leaned back against her travelling cushions with a smile which made Lily wish there had been no vacant seat beside her own.
Chapter 3
Bridge at Bellomont usually lasted till the small hours; and when Lily went to bed that night she had played too long for her own good.
Feeling no desire for the self-communion which awaited her in her room, she lingered on the broad stairway, looking down into the hall below, where the last card-players were grouped about the tray of tall glasses and silver-collared decanters which the butler had just placed on a low table near the fire.
The hall was arcaded, with a gallery supported on columns of pale yellow marble. Tall clumps of flowering plants were grouped against a background of dark foliage in the angles of the walls. On the crimson carpet a deer-hound and two or three spaniels dozed luxuriously before the fire, and the light from the great central lantern overhead shed a brightness on the women’s hair and struck sparks from their jewels as they moved.
There were moments when such scenes delighted Lily, when they gratified her sense of beauty and her craving for the external finish of life; there were others when they gave a sharper edge to the meagreness of her own opportunities. This was one of the moments when the sense of contrast was uppermost, and she turned away impatiently as Mrs. George Dorset, glittering in serpentine spangles, drew Percy Gryce in her wake to a confidential nook beneath the gallery.