She wheeled about, however, full of a purpose; she passed back through
the pictured rooms, for it pleased her, this idea of a talk with Mr.
Pitman--as much, that is, as anything could please a young person so
troubled. It happened indeed that when she saw him rise at sight of
her from the settee where he had told her five minutes before that she
would find him, it was just with her nervousness that his presence
seemed, as through an odd suggestion of help, to connect itself.
Nothing truly would be quite so odd for her case as aid proceeding
from Mr. Pitman; unless perhaps the oddity would be even greater for
himself--the oddity of her having taken into her head an appeal to
him.

She had had to feel alone with a vengeance--inwardly alone and
miserably alarmed--to be ready to "meet," that way, at the first
sign from him, the successor to her dim father in her dim father's
lifetime, the second of her mother's two divorced husbands. It made a
queer relation for her; a relation that struck her at this moment as
less edifying, less natural and graceful than it would have been even
for her remarkable mother--and still in spite of this parent's third
marriage, her union with Mr. Connery, from whom she was informally
separated. It was at the back of Julia's head as she approached Mr.
Pitman, or it was at least somewhere deep within her soul, that if
this last of Mrs. Connery's withdrawals from the matrimonial yoke had
received the sanction of the court (Julia had always heard, from far
back, so much about the "Court") she herself, as after a fashion,
in that event, a party to it, would not have had the cheek to make
up--which was how she inwardly phrased what she was doing--to the
long, lean, loose, slightly cadaverous gentleman who was a memory, for
her, of the period from her twelfth to her seventeenth year. She had