In which autumn retreats and the social world resumes its fastidious pace, leaving Lily Bart painfully aware of her fading place among the fashionable elite and the harsh demands of maintaining appearances amid dwindling fortune. As she confides in Gerty Farish about the exhausting toll of a precarious life, the tender vigilance of friendship and the uneasy stirrings of an old acquaintance hint at the delicate tensions beneath their polished surfaces.