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“I hope she has a fortune, if you don’t mind my speaking of it: I mean some of the money we didn’t in our time have–and that we missed, after all, in our poor way and for what we then wanted of it, so quite dreadfully.”

She had been able to wreathe it in a grace quite equal to any he himself had employed; and it was to be said for him also that he kept up, on this, the standard. “Oh, she’s not, thank goodness, at all badly off, poor dear. We shall do very well. How sweet of you to have thought of it! May I tell her that too?” he splendidly glared. Yes, he glared–how couldn’t he, with what his mind was really full of? But, all the same, he came just here, by her vision, nearer than at any other point to being a gentleman. He came quite within an ace of it–with his taking from her thus the prescription of humility of service, his consenting to act in the interest of her avidity, his letting her mount that way, on his bowed shoulders, to the success in which he could suppose she still believed. He couldn’t know, he would never know, that she had then and there ceased to believe in it–that she saw as clear as the sun in the sky the exact manner in which, between them, before they had done, the Murray Brushes, all zeal and sincerity, all interest in her interesting case, would dish, would ruin, would utterly destroy her. He wouldn’t have needed to go on, for the force and truth of this; but he did go on–he was as crashingly consistent as a motorcar without a brake. He was visibly in love with the idea of what they might do for her and of the rare “social” opportunity that they would, by the same stroke, embrace. How he had been offhand with it, how he had made it parenthetic, that he didn’t happen “personally” to know Basil French–as if it would have been at all likely he should know him, even im personally, and as if he could conceal from her the fact that, since she had made him her overture, this gentleman’s name supremely baited her hook! Oh, they would help Julia Bride if they could–they would do their remarkable best; but they would at any rate have made his acquaintance over it, and she might indeed leave the rest to their thoroughness. He would already have known, he would already have heard; her appeal, she was more and more sure, wouldn’t have come to him as a revelation. He had already talked it over with her, with Miss Lindeck, to whom the Frenches, in their fortress, had never been accessible, and his whole attitude bristled, to Julia’s eyes, with the betrayal of her hand, her voice, her pressure, her calculation. His tone, in fact, as he talked, fairly thrust these things into her face. “But you must see her for yourself. You’ll judge her. You’ll love her. My dear child”–he brought it all out, and if he spoke of children he might, in his candor, have been himself infantine–“my dear child, she’s the person to do it for you. Make it over to her; but,” he laughed, “of course see her first! Couldn’t you,” he wound up–for they were now near their gate, where she was to leave him–“couldn’t you just simply make us meet him, at tea say, informally; just us alone, as pleasant old friends of whom you’d have so naturally and frankly spoken to him: and then see what we’d make of that?”

It was all in his expression; he couldn’t keep it out of that, and his shining good looks couldn’t: ah, he was so fatally much too handsome for her! So the gap showed just there, in his admirable mask and his admirable eagerness; the yawning little chasm showed where the gentleman fell short. But she took this in, she took everything in, she felt herself do it, she heard herself say, while they paused before separation, that she quite saw the point of the meeting, as he suggested, at her tea. She would propose it to Mr. French and would let them know; and he must assuredly bring Miss Lindeck, bring her “right away,” bring her soon, bring them, his fiancee and her, together somehow, and as quickly as possible–so that they should be old friends before the tea. She would propose it to Mr. French, propose it to Mr. French: that hummed in her ears as she went–after she had really got away; hummed as if she were repeating it over, giving it out to the passers, to the pavement, to the sky, and all as in wild discord with the intense little concert of her music-box. The extraordinary thing too was that she quite believed she should do it, and fully meant to; desperately, fantastically passive–since she almost reeled with it as she proceeded–she was capable of proposing anything to any one: capable too of thinking it likely Mr. French would come, for he had never on her previous proposals declined anything. Yes, she would keep it up to the end, this pretence of owing them salvation, and might even live to take comfort in having done for them what they wanted. What they wanted couldn’t but be to get at the Frenches, and what Miss Lindeck above all wanted, baffled of it otherwise, with so many others of the baffled, was to get at Mr. French–for all Mr. French would want of either of them!–still more than Murray did. It was not till after she had got home, got straight into her own room and flung herself on her face, that she yielded to the full taste of the bitterness of missing a connection, missing the man himself, with power to create such a social appetite, such a grab at what might be gained by them. He could make people, even people like these two and whom there were still other people to envy, he could make them push and snatch and scramble like that–and then remain as incapable of taking her from the hands of such patrons as of receiving her straight, say, from those of Mrs. Drack. It was a high note, too, of Julia’s wonderful composition that, even in the long, lonely moan of her conviction of her now certain ruin, all this grim lucidity, the perfect clearance of passion, but made her supremely proud of him.