To Gerty Farish, keeping watch over her with a tenderer if less discerning eye than Mrs. Fisher’s, the results of the struggle were already distinctly visible. She did not, indeed, know what hostages Lily had already given to expediency; but she saw her passionately and irretrievably pledged to the ruinous policy of “keeping up.” Gerty could smile now at her own early dream of her friend’s renovation through adversity: she understood clearly enough that Lily was not of those to whom privation teaches the unimportance of what they have lost. But this very fact, to Gerty, made her friend the more piteously in want of aid, the more exposed to the claims of a tenderness she was so little conscious of needing. Lily, since her return to town, had not often climbed Miss Farish’s stairs. There was something irritating to her in the mute interrogation of Gerty’s sympathy: she felt the real difficulties of her situation to be incommunicable to any one whose theory of values was so different from her own, and the restrictions of Gerty’s life, which had once had the charm of contrast, now reminded her too painfully of the limits to which her own existence was shrinking. When at length, one afternoon, she put into execution the belated resolve to visit her friend, this sense of shrunken opportunities possessed her with unusual intensity. The walk up Fifth Avenue, unfolding before her, in the brilliance of the hard winter sunlight, an interminable procession of fastidiously-equipped carriages—giving her, through the little squares of brougham-windows, peeps of familiar profiles bent above visiting-lists, of hurried hands dispensing notes and cards to attendant footmen—this glimpse of the ever-revolving wheels of the great social machine made Lily more than ever conscious of the steepness and narrowness of Gerty’s stairs, and of the cramped blind alley of life to which they led. Dull stairs destined to be mounted by dull people: how many thousands of insignificant figures were going up and down such stairs all over the world at that very moment—figures as shabby and uninteresting as that of the middle-aged lady in limp black who descended Gerty’s flight as Lily climbed to it! “That was poor Miss Jane Silverton—she came to talk things over with me: she and her sister want to do something to support themselves,” Gerty explained, as Lily followed her into the sitting-room. “To support themselves? Are they so hard up?” Miss Bart asked with a touch of irritation: she had not come to listen to the woes of other people.