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The words, flashing back on Gerty's last hours, struck from her a faint derisive murmur; but Lily, in the blaze of her own misery, was blinded to everything outside it. "You'll let me stay? I shan't mind when daylight comes Is it late? Is the night nearly over? It must be awful to be sleepless everything stands by the bed and stares " Miss Farish caught her straying hands. "Lily, look at me!
Lily uttered a faint laugh for once Mrs. Fisher lacked originality. "Do you mean, like Gerty Farish, to recommend the unfailing panacea of 'a good man's love'?" "No I don't think either of my candidates would answer to that description," said Mrs. Fisher after a pause of reflection. "Either? Are there actually two?" "Well, perhaps I ought to say one and a half for the moment."
Selden ran eagerly up the steps and pulled the bell; and even in his state of self-absorption it came as a sharp surprise to him that the door should open so promptly. It was still more of a surprise to see, as he entered, that it had been opened by Gerty Farish and that behind her, in an agitated blur, several other figures ominously loomed. "Lawrence!"
Farish was one of the candidates: the man of whom Leslie Foster used to talk in such raptures when he first came from Cambridge; the man who lectured on arches, and whose paradox of the one-toothed wheel William will recollect. My father was introduced to him, and invited him to dine with us: Mr. Farish accepted the invitation. We sat on a bench with a few ladies.
The need of discharging that debt had reasserted itself with increased urgency since her return to America, and she spoke her first thought in saying to the anxiously hovering Gerty: "I wonder when the legacies will be paid." But Miss Farish could not pause over the legacies; she broke into a larger indignation.
The object of the association was to provide comfortable lodgings, with a reading-room and other modest distractions, where young women of the class employed in down town offices might find a home when out of work, or in need of rest, and the first year's financial report showed so deplorably small a balance that Miss Farish, who was convinced of the urgency of the work, felt proportionately discouraged by the small amount of interest it aroused.
I don't suppose you're keeping house in there with Grace Stepney, eh? and it struck me you might be rather at loose ends." In Lily's present mood there was no resisting the honest friendliness of this appeal, and she said with a smile: "I am at loose ends for the moment, but Gerty Farish is still in town, and she's good enough to let me be with her whenever she can spare the time." Mrs.
She had supplemented her first gift by personal assistance to one or two of Miss Farish's most appealing subjects, and the admiration and interest her presence excited among the tired workers at the club ministered in a new form to her insatiable desire to please. Gerty Farish was not a close enough reader of character to disentangle the mixed threads of which Lily's philanthropy was woven.
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