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It was somehow a muddled world in which one of her conceivable joys, at this time of day, would be to marry Mr. Pitman–to say nothing of a state of things in which this gentleman’s own fancy could invest such a union with rapture. That, however, was their own mystery, and Julia, with each instant, was more and more clear about hers: so remarkably primed in fact, at the end of three minutes, that though her friend, and though his friend, were both saying things, many things and perhaps quite wonderful things, she had no free attention for them and was only rising and soaring. She was rising to her value, she was soaring with it–the value Mr. Pitman almost convulsively imputed to her, the value that consisted for her of being so unmistakably the most dazzling image Mrs. Brack had ever beheld. These were the uses, for Julia, in fine, of adversity; the range of Mrs. Brack’s experience might have been as small as the measure of her presence was large: Julia was at any rate herself in face of the occasion of her life, and, after all her late repudiations and reactions, had perhaps never yet known the quality of this moment’s success. She hadn’t an idea of what, on either side, had been uttered–beyond Mr. Pitman’s allusion to her having befriended him of old: she simply held his companion with her radiance and knew she might be, for her effect, as irrelevant as she chose. It was relevant to do what he wanted–it was relevant to dish herself. She did it now with a kind of passion, to say nothing of her knowing, with it, that every word of it added to her beauty. She gave him away in short, up to the hilt, for any use of her own, and should have nothing to clutch at now but the possibility of Murray Brush.

“He says I was good to him, Mrs. Drack; and I’m sure I hope I was, since I should be ashamed to be anything else. If I could be good to him now I should be glad–that’s just what, a while ago, I rushed up to him here, after so long, to give myself the pleasure of saying. I saw him years ago very particularly, very miserably tried–and I saw the way he took it. I did see it, you dear man,” she sublimely went on–“I saw it for all you may protest, for all you may hate me to talk about you! I saw you behave like a gentleman–since Mrs. Drack agrees with me, so charmingly, that there are not many to be met. I don’t know whether you care, Mrs. Drack”–she abounded, she revelled in the name–“but I’ve always remembered it of him: that under the most extraordinary provocation he was decent and patient and brave. No appearance of anything different matters, for I speak of what I know. Of course I’m nothing and nobody; I’m only a poor frivolous girl, but I was very close to him at the time. That’s all my little story–if it should interest you at all.” She measured every beat of her wing, she knew how high she was going and paused only when it was quite vertiginous. Here she hung a moment as in the glare of the upper blue; which was but the glare–what else could it be?–of the vast and magnificent attention of both her auditors, hushed, on their side, in the splendor she emitted. She had at last to steady herself, and she scarce knew afterward at what rate or in what way she had still inimitably come down–her own eyes fixed all the while on the very figure of her achievement. She had sacrificed her mother on the altar–proclaimed her as false and cruel: and if that didn’t “fix” Mr. Pitman, as he would have said–well, it was all she could do. But the cost of her action already somehow came back to her with increase; the dear gaunt man fairly wavered, to her sight, in the glory of it, as if signalling at her, with wild gleeful arms, from some mount of safety, while the massive lady just spread and spread like a rich fluid a bit helplessly spilt. It was really the outflow of the poor woman’s honest response, into which she seemed to melt, and Julia scarce distinguished the two apart even for her taking gracious leave of each. “Good-bye, Mrs. Drack; I’m awfully happy to have met you”–like as not it was for this she had grasped Mr. Pitman’s hand. And then to him or to her, it didn’t matter which, “Good-bye, dear good Mr. Pitman–hasn’t it been nice after so long?”