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She let him hear then everything, in spite of feeling herself slip, while she did so, to some doom as yet incalculable; she went on very much as she had done for Mr. Pitman and Mrs. Drack, with the rage of desperation and, as she was afterward to call it to herself, the fascination of the abyss. She didn’t know, couldn’t have said at the time, why his projected benevolence should have had most so the virtue to scare her: he would patronize her, as an effect of her vividness, if not of her charm, and would do this with all high intention, finding her case, or rather their case, their funny old case, taking on of a sudden such refreshing and edifying life, to the last degree curious and even important; but there were gaps of connection between this and the intensity of the perception here overtaking her that she shouldn’t be able to move in any direction without dishing herself. That she couldn’t afford it where she had got to–couldn’t afford the deplorable vulgarity of having been so many times informally affianced and contracted (putting it only at that, at its being by the new lights and fashions so unpardonably vulgar): he took this from her without turning, as she might have said, a hair; except just to indicate, with his new superiority, that he felt the distinguished appeal and notably the pathos of it. He still took it from her that she hoped nothing, as it were, from any other alibi–the people to drag into court being too many and too scattered; but that, as it was with him, Murray Brush, she had been most vulgar, most everything she had better not have been, so she depended on him for the innocence it was actually vital she should establish. He flushed or frowned or winced no more at that than he did when she once more fairly emptied her satchel and, quite as if they had been Nancy and the Artful Dodger, or some nefarious pair of that sort, talking things over in the manner of Oliver Twist, revealed to him the fondness of her view that, could she but have produced a cleaner slate, she might by this time have pulled it off with Mr. French. Yes, he let her in that way sacrifice her honorable connection with him–all the more honorable for being so completely at an end–to the crudity of her plan for not missing another connection, so much more brilliant than what he offered, and for bringing another man, with whom she so invidiously and unflatteringly compared him, into her greedy life.

There was only a moment during which, by a particular lustrous look she had never had from him before, he just made her wonder which turn he was going to take; she felt, however, as safe as was consistent with her sense of having probably but added to her danger, when he brought out, the next instant: “Don’t you seem to take the ground that we were guilty–that you were ever guilty–of something we shouldn’t have been? What did we ever do that was secret, or underhand, or any way not to be acknowledged? What did we do but exchange our young vows with the best faith in the world–publicly, rejoicingly, with the full assent of every one connected with us? I mean of course,” he said with his grave kind smile, “till we broke off so completely because we found that–practically, financially, on the hard worldly basis–we couldn’t work it. What harm, in the sight of God or man, Julia,” he asked in his fine rich way, “did we ever do?”

She gave him back his look, turning pale. “Am I talking of that? Am I talking of what we know? I’m talking of what others feel–of what they have to feel; of what it’s just enough for them to know not to be able to get over it, once they do really know it. How do they know what didn’t pass between us, with all the opportunities we had? That’s none of their business–if we were idiots enough, on the top of everything! What you may or mayn’t have done doesn’t count, for you; but there are people for whom it’s loathsome that a girl should have gone on like that from one person to another and still pretend to be–well, all that a nice girl is supposed to be. It’s as if we had but just waked up, mother and I, to such a remarkable prejudice; and now we have it–when we could do so well without it!–staring us in the face. That mother should have insanely let me, should so vulgarly have taken it for my natural, my social career–that’s the disgusting, humiliating thing: with the lovely account it gives of both of us! But mother’s view of a delicacy in things!” she went on with scathing grimness; “mother’s measure of anything, with her grand ‘gained cases’ (there’ll be another yet, she finds them so easy!) of which she’s so publicly proud! You see I’ve no margin,” said Julia; letting him take it from her flushed face as much as he would that her mother hadn’t left her an inch. It was that he should make use of the spade with her for the restoration of a bit of a margin just wide enough to perch on till the tide of peril should have ebbed a little, it was that he should give her that lift–!