ng
from Mr. Pitman; unless perhaps the oddity would be even greater for
himself--the oddity of her having taken into her head an appeal to
him.

She had had to feel alone with a vengeance--inwardly alone and
miserably alarmed--to be ready to "meet," that way, at the first
sign from him, the successor to her dim father in her dim father's
lifetime, the second of her mother's two divorced husbands. It made a
queer relation for her; a relation that struck her at this moment as
less edifying, less natural and graceful than it would have been even
for her remarkable mother--and still in spite of this parent's third
marriage, her union with Mr. Connery, from whom she was informally
separated. It was at the back of Julia's head as she approached Mr.
Pitman, or it was at least somewhere deep within her soul, that if
this last of Mrs. Connery's withdrawals from the matrimonial yoke had
received the sanction of the court (Julia had always heard, from far
back, so much about the "Court") she herself, as after a fashion,
in that event, a party to it, would not have had the cheek to make
up--which was how she inwardly phrased what she was doing--to the
long, lean, loose, slightly cadaverous gentleman who was a memory, for
her, of the period from her twelfth to her seventeenth year. She had
got on with him, perversely, much better than her mother had, and the
bulging misfit of his duck waistcoat, with his trick of swinging his
eye-glass, at the end of an extraordinarily long string, far over
the scene, came back to her as positive features of the image of her
remoter youth. Her present age--for her later time had seen so many
things happen--gave her a perspective.

Fifty things came up as she stood there before him, some of them
floating in from the past, others hovering with freshness: how she
used to dodge the rotary movement made by his pince-nez while he
always awkwardly, and kindly, and often funnily, talked--it had
once hit her rather badly in the eye; how she used to pull down and
straighten his waistcoat, making it set a little better, a thing of
a sort her mother never did; how friendly and familiar she must have
been with him for that, or else a forward little minx; how she felt
almost capable of doing it again now, just to sound the right note,
and how sure she was of the way he would take it if she did; how much
nicer he had clearly been, all the while, poor dear man, than his wife
and the court had made it possible fo