FullReads

The force of it had brought her to her feet, but he sat there smiling up as at the natural tribute of her interest. “I tell you before any one else; it’s not to be ‘out’ for a day or two yet. But we want you to know; she said that as soon as I mentioned to her that I had heard from you. I mention to her everything, you see!”–and he almost simpered while, still in his seat, he held the end of his cigarette, all delicately and as for a form of gentle emphasis, with the tips of his fine fingers. “You’ve not met her, Mary Lindeck, I think: she tells me she hasn’t the pleasure of knowing you, but she desires it so much–particularly longs for it. She’ll take an interest too,” he went on; “you must let me immediately bring her to you. She has heard so much about you and she really wants to see you.”

“Oh mercy me!” poor Julia gasped again–so strangely did history repeat itself and so did this appear the echo, on Murray Brush’s lips, and quite to drollery, of that sympathetic curiosity of Mrs. Drack’s which Mr. Pitman had, as they said, voiced. Well, there had played before her the vision of a ledge of safety in face of a rising tide; but this deepened quickly to a sense more forlorn, the cold swish of waters already up to her waist and that would soon be up to her chin. It came really but from the air of her friend, from the perfect benevolence and high unconsciousness with which he kept his posture–as if to show he could patronize her from below upward quite as well as from above down. And as she took it all in, as it spread to a flood, with the great lumps and masses of truth it was floating, she knew inevitable submission, not to say submersion, as she had never known it in her life; going down and down before it, not even putting out her hands to resist or cling by the way, only reading into the young man’s very face an immense fatality and, for all his bright nobleness his absence of rancor or of protesting pride, the great gray blankness of her doom. It was as if the earnest Miss Lindeck, tall and mild, high and lean, with eye-glasses and a big nose, but “marked” in a noticeable way, elegant and distinguished and refined, as you could see from a mile off, and as graceful, for common despair of imitation, as the curves of the “copy” set of old by one’s writing-master–it was as if this stately well-wisher, whom indeed she had never exchanged a word with, but whom she had recognized and placed and winced at as soon as he spoke of her, figured there beside him now as also in portentous charge of her case.

He had ushered her into it in that way as if his mere right word sufficed; and Julia could see them throne together, beautifully at one in all the interests they now shared, and regard her as an object of almost tender solicitude. It was positively as if they had become engaged for her good–in such a happy light as it shed. That was the way people you had known, known a bit intimately, looked at you as soon as they took on the high matrimonial propriety that sponged over the more or less wild past to which you belonged, and of which, all of a sudden, they were aware only through some suggestion it made them for reminding you definitely that you still had a place. On her having had a day or two before to meet Mrs. Drack and to rise to her expectation she had seen and felt herself act, had above all admired herself, and had at any rate known what she said, even though losing, at her altitude, any distinctness in the others. She could have repeated later on the detail of her performance–if she hadn’t preferred to keep it with her as a mere locked-up, a mere unhandled treasure. At present, however, as everything was for her at first deadened and vague, true to the general effect of sounds and motions in water, she couldn’t have said afterward what words she spoke, what face she showed, what impression she made–at least till she had pulled herself round to precautions. She only knew she had turned away, and that this movement must have sooner or later determined his rising to join her, his deciding to accept it, gracefully and condoningly–condoningly in respect to her natural emotion, her inevitable little pang–for an intimation that they would be better on their feet.