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“Why, such a dear thing, Julia–Mrs. David E. Drack. Have you heard of her?” he almost fluted.

New York was vast, and she had not had that advantage. “She’s a widow–?”

“Oh yes: she’s not–” He caught himself up in time. “She’s a real one.” It was as near as he came. But it was as if he had been looking at her now so pathetically hard. “Julia, she has millions.”

Hard, at any rate–whether pathetic or not–was the look she gave him back. “Well, so has–or so will have–Basil French. And more of them than Mrs. Drack, I guess,” Julia quavered.

“Oh, I know what they’ve got!” He took it from her–with the effect of a vague stir, in his long person, of unwelcome embarrassment. But was she going to give up because he was embarrassed? He should know at least what he was costing her. It came home to her own spirit more than ever, but meanwhile he had found his footing. “I don’t see how your mother matters. It isn’t a question of his marrying her.”

“No; but, constantly together as we’ve always been, it’s a question of there being so disgustingly much to get over. If we had, for people like them, but the one ugly spot and the one weak side; if we had made, between us, but the one vulgar kind of mistake: well, I don’t say!” She reflected with a wistfulness of note that was in itself a touching eloquence. “To have our reward in this world we’ve had too sweet a time. We’ve had it all right down here!” said Julia Bride. “I should have taken the precaution to have about a dozen fewer lovers.”

“Ah, my dear, ‘lovers’–!” He ever so comically attenuated.

“Well they were!” She quite flared up. “When you’ve had a ring from each (three diamonds, two pearls, and a rather bad sapphire: I’ve kept them all, and they tell my story!) what are you to call them?”

“Oh, rings–!” Mr. Pitman didn’t call rings anything. “I’ve given Mrs. Drack a ring.”

Julia stared. “Then aren’t you her lover?”

“That, dear child,” he humorously wailed, “is what I want you to find out! But I’ll handle your rings all right,” he more lucidly added.

“You’ll ‘handle’ them?”

“I’ll fix your lovers. I’ll lie about them, if that’s all you want.”

“Oh, about ‘them’–!” She turned away with a sombre drop, seeing so little in it. “That wouldn’t count–from you!” She saw the great shining room, with its mockery of art and “style” and security, all the things she was vainly after, and its few scattered visitors who had left them, Mr. Pitman and herself, in their ample corner, so conveniently at ease. There was only a lady in one of the far doorways, of whom she took vague note and who seemed to be looking at them. “They’d have to lie for themselves!”

“Do you mean he’s capable of putting it to them?”

Mr. Pitman’s tone threw discredit on that possibility, but she knew perfectly well what she meant. “Not of getting at them directly, not, as mother says, of nosing round himself; but of listening–and small blame to him!–to the horrible things other people say of me.”

“But what other people?”

“Why, Mrs. George Maule, to begin with–who intensely loathes us, and who talks to his sisters, so that they may talk to him: which they do, all the while, I’m morally sure (hating me as they also must). But it’s she who’s the real reason–I mean of his holding off. She poisons the air he breathes.”

“Oh well,” said Mr. Pitman, with easy optimism, “if Mrs. George Maule’s a cat–!”

“If she’s a cat she has kittens–four little spotlessly white ones, among whom she’d give her head that Mr. French should make his pick. He could do it with his eyes shut–you can’t tell them apart. But she has every name, every date, as you may say, for my dark ‘record’–as of course they all call it: she’ll be able to give him, if he brings himself to ask her, every fact in its order. And all the while, don’t you see? there’s no one to speak for me.”