in any case, untouched by a thread of gray, and his kept gift of a
certain big-boyish awkwardness--that of his taking their encounter,
for instance, so amusedly, so crudely, though, as she was not unaware,
so eagerly too--he could by no means have been so little his wife's
junior as it had been that lady's habit, after the divorce, to
represent him. Julia had remembered him as old, since she had so
constantly thought of her mother as old; which Mrs. Connery was indeed
now--for her daughter--with her dozen years of actual seniority to
Mr. Pitman and her exquisite hair, the densest, the finest tangle
of arranged silver tendrils that had ever enhanced the effect of a
preserved complexion.

Something in the girl's vision of her quondam stepfather as still
comparatively young--with the confusion, the immense element of
rectification, not to say of rank disproof, that it introduced into
Mrs. Connery's favorite picture of her own injured past--all this
worked, even at the moment, to quicken once more the clearness and
harshness of judgment, the retrospective disgust, as she might have
called it, that had of late grown up in her, the sense of all the
folly and vanity and vulgarity, the lies, the perversities, the
falsification of all life in the interest of who could say what
wretched frivolity, what preposterous policy; amid which she had been
condemned so ignorantly, so pitifully to sit, to walk, to grope, to
flounder, from the very dawn of her consciousness. Didn't poor Mr.
Pitman just touch the sensitive nerve of it when, taking her in with
his facetious, cautious eyes, he spoke to her, right out, of the old,
old story, the everlasting little wonder of her beauty?

"Why, you know, you've grown up so lovely--you're the prettiest girl
I've ever seen!" Of course she was the prettiest girl he had ever