_ like
that, to Julia Bride's expert perception, without something in the
nature of a new one--would be a thousand times different.

It was as a value of _disproof_ that his worth meanwhile so rapidly
grew: the good sight of him, the good sound and sense of him, such
as they were, demolished at a stroke so blessedly much of the horrid
inconvenience of the past that she thought of him; she clutched at
him, for a _general_ saving use, an application as sanative, as
redemptive as some universal healing wash, precious even to the point
of perjury if perjury should be required. That was the terrible thing,
that had been the inward pang with which she watched Basil French
recede: perjury would have to come in somehow and somewhere--oh so
quite certainly!--before the so strange, so rare young man, truly
smitten though she believed him, could be made to rise to the
occasion, before her measureless prize could be assured. It was
present to her, it had been present a hundred times, that if there had
only been some one to (as it were) "deny everything" the situation
might yet be saved. She so needed some one to lie for her--ah, she so
need some one to lie! Her mother's version of everything, her mother's
version of anything, had been at the best, as they said, discounted;
and she herself could but show, of course, for an interested party,
however much she might claim to be none the less a decent girl--to
whatever point, that is, after all that had both remotely and recently
happened, presumptions of anything to be called decency could come in.

After what had recently happened--the two or three indirect but so
worrying questions Mr. French had put to her--it would only be some
thoroughly detached friend or witness who might effectively testify.
An odd form of detachment certainly would reside, for Mr. Pitman's
evidential character, in her mother's having so publicly and
so brilliantly--though, thank the powers, all off in North
Dakota!--severed their connection with him; and yet mightn't it do
_her_ some good, even if the harm it might do her mother were so
little ambiguous? The more her mother had got divorced--with her
dreadful cheap-and-easy second performance in that line and her
present extremity of alienation from Mr. Connery, which enfolded
beyond doubt the germ of a third petition on one side or the
other--the more her mother had distinguished herself in the field of
folly the worse for her own prospect with the Frenches