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Updated: June 22, 2025
By Jove, she looks as if she were capable of big emotions as if, too, you could like her without making love. She's something new." Gerty's amazement was so sincere that she only stared at him, while her red lips parted slightly in a breathless and perfectly unaffected surprise. Something new! Her wonder faded slowly, and she told herself that now at last she understood.
At Gerty's bidding she came or went, admired or disapproved, but of her old impulsive energy there was so little left that Gerty sometimes wondered if her friend had really, as she insisted, "turned to stone." For Laura's face even had frozen until it wore the impassive smile of a statue, and there was in her movements and her voice something of the insensibility of extreme old age.
She then asked concerning Gerty's former way of life, and became so interested in the recital of the little girl's early sorrows and trials, that she was unconscious of the flight of time, and quite unobservant of the departure of the organist, who had ceased playing, closed his instrument, and gone away. Gerty was very communicative.
For a time Gerty's attention was so engrossed by the lamplighting that she could see and enjoy nothing else. But when they reached the corner of the street, and came in sight of a large apothecary's shop, her delight knew no bounds.
Her hand still clung to Gerty's as if to ward off evil dreams, but the hold of her fingers relaxed, her head sank deeper into its shelter, and Gerty felt that she slept. When lily woke she had the bed to herself, and the winter light was in the room. She sat up, bewildered by the strangeness of her surroundings; then memory returned, and she looked about her with a shiver.
Then he remembered that he had never known intimately a woman of commanding intellect, and the novelty inspired him with the spirit of fresh adventure. She had bowed to him over the large muff she carried, and he spoke lightly though his awakened interest showed in his face and voice. "I was the unfortunate subject of Gerty's decision," he said. "Is there no appeal from it?"
But the force of his personality was a force against which she felt that she would struggle until the end. "I'm not sure about the curse," she answered, "but Gerty's heroes and mine are rarely the same, you know." "Then, I suppose, it's virtue that you are after," he remarked. She looked gravely up at him before she bowed her head in assent. "I like virtue," she responded quietly. "Don't you?"
"Go to bed, dear! You work hard and get up early. I'll watch here by the fire, and you'll leave the light, and your door open. All I want is to feel that you are near me." She laid both hands on Gerty's shoulders, with a smile that was like sunrise on a sea strewn with wreckage. "I can't leave you, Lily. Come and lie on my bed. Your hands are frozen you must undress and be made warm."
The conversation with Wilkins had reached Gerty's ears at the same instant, and she, too, sat now with her enquiring gaze bent on the door, which opened presently to admit the ample person of Madame Alta.
She had dropped sideways in Gerty's big arm-chair, her head buried where lately Selden's had leaned, in a beauty of abandonment that drove home to Gerty's aching senses the inevitableness of her own defeat. Ah, it needed no deliberate purpose on Lily's part to rob her of her dream!
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