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She could have worked it out at her leisure, to the last link of the chain, the way their prettiness had set them trap after trap, all along–had foredoomed them to awful ineptitude. When you were as pretty as that you could, by the whole idiotic consensus, be nothing but pretty; and when you were nothing “but” pretty you could get into nothing but tight places, out of which you could then scramble by nothing but masses of fibs. And there was no one, all the while, who wasn’t eager to egg you on, eager to make you pay to the last cent the price of your beauty. What creature would ever for a moment help you to behave as if something that dragged in its wake a bit less of a lumbering train would, on the whole, have been better for you? The consequences of being plain were only negative–you failed of this and that; but the consequences of being as they were, what were these but endless? though indeed, as far as failing went, your beauty too could let you in for enough of it. Who, at all events, would ever for a moment credit you, in the luxuriance of that beauty, with the study, on your own side, of such truths as these? Julia Bride could, at the point she had reached, positively ask herself this even while lucidly conscious of the inimitable, the triumphant and attested projection, all round her, of her exquisite image. It was only Basil French who had at last, in his doubtless dry, but all distinguished way–the way surely, as it was borne in upon her, of all the blood of all the Frenches–stepped out of the vulgar rank. It was only he who, by the trouble she discerned in him, had made her see certain things. It was only for him–and not a bit ridiculously, but just beautifully, almost sublimely–that their being “nice,” her mother and she between them, had not seemed to profit by their being so furiously handsome.

This had, ever so grossly and ever so tiresomely, satisfied every one else; since every one had thrust upon them, had imposed upon them, as by a great cruel conspiracy, their silliest possibilities; fencing them in to these, and so not only shutting them out from others, but mounting guard at the fence, walking round and round outside it, to see they didn’t escape, and admiring them, talking to them, through the rails, in mere terms of chaff, terms of chucked cakes and apples–as if they had been antelopes or zebras, or even some superior sort of performing, of dancing, bear. It had been reserved for Basil French to strike her as willing to let go, so to speak, a pound or two of this fatal treasure if he might only have got in exchange for it an ounce or so more of their so much less obvious and Jess published personal history. Yes, it described him to say that, in addition to all the rest of him, and of his personal history, and of his family, and of theirs, in addition to their social posture, as that of a serried phalanx, and to their notoriously enormous wealth and crushing respectability, she might have been ever so much less lovely for him if she had been only–well, a little prepared to answer questions. And it wasn’t as if quiet, cultivated, earnest, public-spirited, brought up in Germany, infinitely travelled, awfully like a high-caste Englishman, and all the other pleasant things, it wasn’t as if he didn’t love to be with her, to look at her, just as she was; for he loved it exactly as much, so far as that footing simply went, as any free and foolish youth who had ever made the last demonstration of it. It was that marriage was, for him–and for them all, the serried Frenches–a great matter, a goal to which a man of intelligence, a real shy, beautiful man of the world, didn’t hop on one foot, didn’t skip and jump, as if he were playing an urchins’ game, but toward which he proceeded with a deep and anxious, a noble and highly just deliberation.