got on with him, perversely, much better than her mother had, and the
bulging misfit of his duck waistcoat, with his trick of swinging his
eye-glass, at the end of an extraordinarily long string, far over
the scene, came back to her as positive features of the image of her
remoter youth. Her present age--for her later time had seen so many
things happen--gave her a perspective.

Fifty things came up as she stood there before him, some of them
floating in from the past, others hovering with freshness: how she
used to dodge the rotary movement made by his pince-nez while he
always awkwardly, and kindly, and often funnily, talked--it had
once hit her rather badly in the eye; how she used to pull down and
straighten his waistcoat, making it set a little better, a thing of
a sort her mother never did; how friendly and familiar she must have
been with him for that, or else a forward little minx; how she felt
almost capable of doing it again now, just to sound the right note,
and how sure she was of the way he would take it if she did; how much
nicer he had clearly been, all the while, poor dear man, than his wife
and the court had made it possible for him publicly to appear; how
much younger, too, he now looked, in spite of his rather melancholy,
his mildly jaundiced, humorously determined sallowness and his
careless assumption, everywhere, from his forehead to his exposed and
relaxed blue socks, almost sky-blue, as in past days, of creases and
folds and furrows that would have been perhaps tragic if they hadn't
seemed rather to show, like his whimsical black eyebrows, the vague,
interrogative arch.

Of course he wasn't wretched if he wasn't more sure of his
wretchedness than that! Julia Bride would have been sure--had she been
through what she supposed _he_ had! With his thick, loose black hair,