a meeting in those promiscuous
halls, had placed within his reach the pleasure of bringing them
together. It didn't indeed matter, Julia felt, what he was saying: he
conveyed everything, as far as she was concerned, by a moral pressure
as unmistakable as if, for a symbol of it, he had thrown himself
on her neck. Above all, meanwhile, this high consciousness
prevailed--that the good lady herself, however huge she loomed, had
entered, by the end of a minute, into a condition as of suspended
weight and arrested mass, stilled to artless awe by the fact of her
vision. Julia had practised almost to lassitude the art of tracing in
the people who looked at her the impression promptly sequent; but it
was a striking point that if, in irritation, in depression, she felt
that the lightest eyes of men, stupid at their clearest, had given her
pretty well all she should ever care for, she could still gather a
freshness from the tribute of her own sex, still care to see her
reflection in the faces of women. Never, probably, never would that
sweet be tasteless--with such a straight grim spoon was it mostly
administered, and so flavored and strengthened by the competence of
their eyes. Women knew so much best _how_ a woman surpassed--how and
where and why, with no touch or torment of it lost on them; so that as
it produced mainly and primarily the instinct of aversion, the sense
of extracting the recognition, of gouging out the homage, was on the
whole the highest crown one's felicity could wear. Once in a way,
however, the grimness beautifully dropped, the jealousy failed: the
admiration was all there and the poor plain sister handsomely paid it.
It had never been so paid, she was presently certain, as by this great
generous object of Mr., Pitman's flame, who without optical aid, it
well might have seemed, nevertheless entirely grasped her--might in
fact, all benevolently, have been groping her over as by some huge
mild proboscis. She gave Mrs. Brack pleasure in short; and who could
say of what other pleasures the poor lady hadn't been cheated?

It was somehow a muddled world in which one of her conceivable joys,
at this time of day, would be to marry Mr. Pitman--to say nothing of a
state of things in which this gentleman's own fancy could invest such
a union with rapture. That, however, was their own mystery, and Julia,
with each instant, was more and more clear about hers: so remarkably
primed in fact, at the end of three minutes, tha