clothes, so perfectly splendid, so perfectly idiotic. These things had
been the "points" of antelope and zebra; putting Mrs. Connery for the
zebra, as the more remarkably striped or spotted. Such were the _data_
Basil French's inquiry would elicit: her own six engagements and her
mother's three nullified marriages--nine nice distinct little horrors
in all. What on earth was to be done about them?

It was notable, she was afterward to recognize, that there had been
nothing of the famous business slackness in the positive pounce with
which Mr. Pitman put it to her that, as soon as he had made her
out "for sure," identified her there as old Julia grown-up and
gallivanting with a new admirer, a smarter young fellow than ever yet,
he had had the inspiration of her being exactly the good girl to
help him. She certainly found him strike the hour again, with these
vulgarities of tone--forms of speech that her mother had anciently
described as by themselves, once he had opened the whole battery,
sufficient ground for putting him away. Full, however, of the use she
should have for him, she wasn't going to mind trifles. What she really
gasped at was that, so oddly, he was ahead of her at the start. "Yes,
I want something of you, Julia, and I want it right now: you can do me
a turn, and I'm blest if my luck--which has once or twice been
pretty good, you know--hasn't sent you to me." She knew the luck he
meant--that of her mother's having so enabled him to get rid of her;
but it was the nearest allusion of the merely invidious kind that he
would make. It had thus come to our young woman on the spot and by
divination: the service he desired of her matched with remarkable
closeness what she had so promptly taken into her head to name to
himself--to name in her own interest, though deterred as yet from
having brought it right out. She had been prevented by his speaking,
the first thing, in that way, as if he had known Mr. French--which