tle to recognize in Mrs. Connery at forty-seven, and in spite, or
perhaps indeed just by reason, of the arranged silver tendrils which
were so like some rare bird's-nest in a morning frost, a facile
supremacy for the dazzling effect--it cost her so little that her view
even rather exaggerated the lustre of the different maternal items.
She would have put it _all_ off if possible, all off on other
shoulders and on other graces and other morals than her own, the
burden of physical charm that had made so easy a ground, such a native
favoring air, for the aberrations which, apparently inevitable and
without far consequences at the time, had yet at this juncture so much
better not have been.

She could have worked it out at her leisure, to the last link of the
chain, the way their prettiness had set them trap after trap, all
along--had foredoomed them to awful ineptitude. When you were as
pretty as that you could, by the whole idiotic consensus, be nothing
_but_ pretty; and when you were nothing "but" pretty you could get
into nothing but tight places, out of which you could then scramble by
nothing but masses of fibs. And there was no one, all the while, who
wasn't eager to egg you on, eager to make you pay to the last cent the
price of your beauty. What creature would ever for a moment help you
to behave as if something that dragged in its wake a bit less of a
lumbering train would, on the whole, have been better for you? The
consequences of being plain were only negative--you failed of this and
that; but the consequences of being as _they_ were, what were these
but endless? though indeed, as far as failing went, your beauty too
could let you in for enough of it. Who, at all events, would ever for
a moment credit you, in the luxuriance of that beauty, with the study,
on your own side, of such truths as these? Julia Bride could, at the
point she had reached, positively ask herself this even while lucidly
conscious of the inimitable, the triumphant and attested projection,
all round her, of her exquisite image. It was only Basil French who
had at last, in his doubtless dry, but all distinguished way--the
way surely, as it was borne in upon her, of all the blood of all the
Frenches--stepped out of the vulgar rank. It was only he who, by the
trouble she discerned in him, had made her see certain things. It was
only for him--and not a bit ridiculously, but just beautifully, almost
sublimely--that their being "nice," her mother