rettiest girl he had ever
seen; she was the prettiest girl people much more privileged than he
had ever seen; since when hadn't she been passing for the prettiest
girl any one had ever seen? She had lived in that, from far back, from
year to year, from day to day and from hour to hour--she had lived
for it and literally _by_ it, as who should say; but Mr. Pitman was
somehow more illuminating than he knew, with the present lurid light
that he cast upon old dates, old pleas, old values, and old mysteries,
not to call them old abysses: it had rolled over her in a swift wave,
with the very sight of him, that her mother couldn't possibly have
been right about him--as about what in the world had she ever been
right?--so that in fact he was simply offered her there as one more of
Mrs. Connery's lies. She might have thought she knew them all by this
time; but he represented for her, coming in just as he did, a fresh
discovery, and it was this contribution of freshness that made her
somehow feel she liked him. It was she herself who, for so long,
with her retained impression, had been right about him; and the
rectification he represented had _all_ shone out of him, ten minutes
before, on his catching her eye while she moved through the room with
Mr. French. She had never doubted of his probable faults--which her
mother had vividly depicted as the basest of vices; since some of
them, and the most obvious (not the vices, but the faults) were
written on him as he stood there: notably, for instance, the
exasperating "business slackness" of which Mrs. Connery had, before
the tribunal, made so pathetically much. It might have been, for that
matter, the very business slackness that affected Julia as presenting
its friendly breast, in the form of a cool loose sociability, to her
own actual tension; though it was also true for her, after they had
exchanged fifty words, that he had as well his inward fever and that,
if he was perhaps wondering what was so particularly the matter with
her, she could make out not less that something was the matter
with _him_. It had been vague, yet it had been intense, the mute
reflection, "Yes, I'm going to like him, and he's going somehow to
help me!" that had directed her steps so straight to him. She was
sure even then of this, that he wouldn't put to her a query about his
former wife, that he took to-day no grain of interest in Mrs. Connery;
that his interest, such as it was--and he couldn't look _quite