t though her friend,
and though _his_ friend, were both saying things, many things and
perhaps quite wonderful things, she had no free attention for them
and was only rising and soaring. She was rising to her value, she was
soaring _with_ it--the value Mr. Pitman almost convulsively imputed
to her, the value that consisted for her of being so unmistakably the
most dazzling image Mrs. Brack had ever beheld. These were the uses,
for Julia, in fine, of adversity; the range of Mrs. Brack's experience
might have been as small as the measure of her presence was large:
Julia was at any rate herself in face of the occasion of her life,
and, after all her late repudiations and reactions, had perhaps never
yet known the quality of this moment's success. She hadn't an idea of
what, on either side, had been uttered--beyond Mr. Pitman's allusion
to her having befriended him of old: she simply held his companion
with her radiance and knew she might be, for her effect, as irrelevant
as she chose. It was relevant to do what he wanted--it was relevant to
dish herself. She did it now with a kind of passion, to say nothing of
her knowing, with it, that every word of it added to her beauty. She
gave him away in short, up to the hilt, for any use of her own, and
should have nothing to clutch at now but the possibility of Murray
Brush.

"He says I was good to him, Mrs. Drack; and I'm sure I hope I was,
since I should be ashamed to be anything else. If I could be good to
him now I should be glad--that's just what, a while ago, I rushed up
to him here, after so long, to give myself the pleasure of saying. I
saw him years ago very particularly, very miserably tried--and I saw
the way he took it. I did see it, you dear man," she sublimely went
on--"I saw it for all you may protest, for all you may hate me to talk
about you! I saw you behave like a gentleman--since Mrs. Drack agrees
with me, so charmingly, that there are not many to be met. I don't
know whether you care, Mrs. Drack"--she abounded, she revelled in
the name--"but I've always remembered it of him: that under the most
extraordinary provocation he was decent and patient and brave. No
appearance of anything different matters, for I speak of what I
_know_. Of course I'm nothing and nobody; I'm only a poor frivolous
girl, but I was very close to him at the time. That's all my little
story--if it _should_ interest you at all." She measured every beat of
her wing, she knew how high she wa