Charybdis.

It was not, however, that she felt wholly a fool in having obeyed this
impulse to pick up again her kind old friend. _She_ at least had never
divorced him, and her horrid little filial evidence in court had been
but the chatter of a parrakeet, of precocious plumage and croak,
repeating words earnestly taught her, and that she could scarce even
pronounce. Therefore, as far as steering went, he _must_ for the hour
take a hand. She might actually have wished in fact that he shouldn't
now have seemed so tremendously struck with her; since it was an
extraordinary situation for a girl, this crisis of her fortune, this
positive wrong that the flagrancy, what she would have been ready to
call the very vulgarity, of her good looks might do her at a moment
when it was vital she should hang as straight as a picture on the
wall. Had it ever yet befallen any young woman in the world to wish
with secret intensity that she might have been, for her convenience, a
shade less inordinately pretty? She had come to that, to this view of
the bane, the primal curse, of their lavish physical outfit, which had
included everything and as to which she lumped herself resentfully
with her mother. The only thing was that her mother was, thank
goodness, still so much prettier, still so assertively, so publicly,
so trashily, so ruinously pretty. Wonderful the small grimness with
which Julia Bride put off on this parent the middle-aged maximum of
their case and the responsibility of their defect. It cost her so
little to recognize in Mrs. Connery at forty-seven, and in spite, or
perhaps indeed just by reason, of the arranged silver tendrils which
were so like some rare bird's-nest in a morning frost, a facile
supremacy for the dazzling effect--it cost her so little that her view
even rather exaggerated the lustre of the different maternal items.
She would have put it _all_ off if possible, all off on other