After what had recently happened--the two or three indirect but so
worrying questions Mr. French had put to her--it would only be some
thoroughly detached friend or witness who might effectively testify.
An odd form of detachment certainly would reside, for Mr. Pitman's
evidential character, in her mother's having so publicly and
so brilliantly--though, thank the powers, all off in North
Dakota!--severed their connection with him; and yet mightn't it do
_her_ some good, even if the harm it might do her mother were so
little ambiguous? The more her mother had got divorced--with her
dreadful cheap-and-easy second performance in that line and her
present extremity of alienation from Mr. Connery, which enfolded
beyond doubt the germ of a third petition on one side or the
other--the more her mother had distinguished herself in the field of
folly the worse for her own prospect with the Frenches, whose
minds she had guessed to be accessible, and with such an effect of
dissimulated suddenness, to some insidious poison.

It was very unmistakable, in other words, that the more dismissed and
detached Mr. Pitman should have come to appear, the more as divorced,
or at least as divorcing, his before-time wife would by the same
stroke figure--so that it was here poor Julia could but lose herself.
The crazy divorces only, or the half-dozen successive and still
crazier engagements only--gathered fruit, bitter fruit, of her own
incredibly allowed, her own insanely fostered frivolity--either of
these two groups of skeletons at the banquet might singly be dealt
with; but the combination, the fact of each party's having been so
mixed-up with whatever was least presentable for the other, the fact
of their having so shockingly amused themselves together, made all
present steering resemble the classic middle course between Scylla and