impossible before began in the light of self-pity to seem possible.
He had (he knew) to go back to the slate-colored house. Turning, he said to the old nigger, "I'm coming back," and then halting, he asked, "How's Mrs. Shane?"
"She ain't no better, sir. She's dying, and nothin' kin save her." Suddenly the black face lighted up. "But Miss Lily's come back. She came back last night."
"Yes?"
"You don't know Miss Lily, mebbe."
"No. . . . I've seen her years ago riding through the Town."
"Then you don't know what she's like. . . . The old Missie can die now that Miss Lily's come home. She jus' couldn't die without seein' Miss Lily."
Philip scarcely heard him. He was thinking about his own troubles, and Lily Shane was a creature who belonged to another world whose borders would never touch his own. Even as a boy, looking after her as she rode in the mulberry victoria up Park Avenue, it never occurred to him that he would ever come nearer to her. There was something magnificent about her that set her apart from all the others in the Town. And there was always the wicked glamour that enveloped one who, it was whispered, had had a child out of wedlock and then declined to marry its father.
How could Lily Shane ever touch the world of Uncle Elmer and Naomi and Emma and Mabelle? No, she did not exist for him. She was like one of the actresses he had followed furtively along Main Street as a boy, because a mysterious, worldly glamour clung to those
