, whose
minds she had guessed to be accessible, and with such an effect of
dissimulated suddenness, to some insidious poison.

It was very unmistakable, in other words, that the more dismissed and
detached Mr. Pitman should have come to appear, the more as divorced,
or at least as divorcing, his before-time wife would by the same
stroke figure--so that it was here poor Julia could but lose herself.
The crazy divorces only, or the half-dozen successive and still
crazier engagements only--gathered fruit, bitter fruit, of her own
incredibly allowed, her own insanely fostered frivolity--either of
these two groups of skeletons at the banquet might singly be dealt
with; but the combination, the fact of each party's having been so
mixed-up with whatever was least presentable for the other, the fact
of their having so shockingly amused themselves together, made all
present steering resemble the classic middle course between Scylla and
Charybdis.

It was not, however, that she felt wholly a fool in having obeyed this
impulse to pick up again her kind old friend. _She_ at least had never
divorced him, and her horrid little filial evidence in court had been
but the chatter of a parrakeet, of precocious plumage and croak,
repeating words earnestly taught her, and that she could scarce even
pronounce. Therefore, as far as steering went, he _must_ for the hour
take a hand. She might actually have wished in fact that he shouldn't
now have seemed so tremendously struck with her; since it was an
extraordinary situation for a girl, this crisis of her fortune, this
positive wrong that the flagrancy, what she would have been ready to
call the very vulgarity, of her good looks might do her at a moment
when it was vital she should hang as straight as a picture on the
wall. Had it ever yet befallen any young woman in the world to wish
with secret intensity that she might have been, for her convenience, a
shade less inordinately pretty? She had come to that, to this view of
the bane, the primal curse, of their lavish physical outfit, which had
included everything and as to which she lumped herself resentfully
with her mother. The only thing was that her mother was, thank
goodness, still so much prettier, still so assertively, so publicly,
so trashily, so ruinously pretty. Wonderful the small grimness with
which Julia Bride put off on this parent the middle-aged maximum of
their case and the responsibility of their defect. It cost her so
lit