d he was
wreathed again, this time as if for life, in his large slow smile.
"She loves this place--she's awfully keen on art. Like _you_, Julia,
if you haven't changed--I remember how you did love art." He looked
at her quite tenderly, as to keep her up to it. "You must still of
course--from the way you're here. Just let her _feel_ that," the poor
man fantastically urged. And then with his kind eyes on her and his
good ugly mouth stretched as for delicate emphasis from ear to ear:
"Every little helps!"

He made her wonder for him, ask herself, and with a certain intensity,
questions she yet hated the trouble of; as whether he were still as
moneyless as in the other time--which was certain indeed, for any
fortune he ever would have made. His slackness, on that ground, stuck
out of him almost as much as if he had been of rusty or "seedy"
aspect--which, luckily for him, he wasn't at all: he looked, in his
way, like some pleasant eccentric, ridiculous, but real gentleman,
whose taste might be of the queerest, but his credit with his tailor
none the less of the best. She wouldn't have been the least ashamed,
had their connection lasted, of going about with him: so that what
a fool, again, her mother had been--since Mr. Connery, sorry as one
might be for him, was irrepressibly vulgar. Julia's quickness was,
for the minute, charged with all this; but she had none the less her
feeling of the right thing to say and the right way to say it. If
he was after a future financially assured, even as she herself so
frantically was, she wouldn't cast the stone. But if he had talked
about her to strange women she couldn't be less than a little
majestic. "Who then is the person in question for you--?"

"Why, such a dear thing, Julia--Mrs. David E. Drack. Have you heard of
her?" he almost fluted.

New York was vast, and she had not had that advantage. "She's a
widow--?"

"Oh yes: she's not--" He caught himself up in time. "She's a real
one." It was as near as he came. But it was as if he had been looking
at her now so pathetically hard. "Julia, she has millions."

Hard, at any rate--whether pathetic or not--was the look she gave him
back. "Well, so has--or so _will_ have--Basil French. And more of them
than Mrs. Drack, I guess," Julia quavered.

"Oh, I know what _they've_ got!" He took it from her--with the effect
of a vague stir, in his long person, of unwelcome embarrassment. But
was she going to give up because he was embarrassed