strange presence to a happy connection with which Mr. Pitman aspired
and which had thus sailed, with placid majesty, into their troubled
waters. She was clearly not shy, Mrs. David E. Drack, yet neither was
she ominously bold; she was bland and "good," Julia made sure at a
glance, and of a large complacency, as the good and the bland are apt
to be--a large complacency, a large sentimentality, a large innocent,
elephantine archness: she fairly rioted in that dimension of size.
Habited in an extraordinary quantity of stiff and lustrous black
brocade, with enhancements, of every description, that twinkled
and tinkled, that rustled and rumbled with her least movement, she
presented a huge, hideous, pleasant face, a featureless desert in a
remote quarter of which the disproportionately small eyes might have
figured a pair of rash adventurers all but buried in the sand. They
reduced themselves when she smiled to barely discernible points--a
couple of mere tiny emergent heads--though the foreground of the
scene, as if to make up for it, gaped with a vast benevolence. In
a word Julia saw--and as if she had needed nothing more; saw Mr.
Pitman's opportunity, saw her own, saw the exact nature both of Mrs.
Drack's circumspection and of Mrs. Drack's sensibility, saw even,
glittering there in letters of gold and as a part of the whole
metallic coruscation, the large figure of her income, largest of all
her attributes, and (though perhaps a little more as a luminous blur
beside all this) the mingled ecstasy and agony of Mr. Pitman's hope
and Mr. Pitman's fear.

He was introducing them, with his pathetic belief in the virtue for
every occasion, in the solvent for every trouble, of an extravagant,
genial, professional humor; he was naming her to Mrs. Drack as the
charming young friend he had told her so much about and who had been
as an angel to him in a weary time; he was saying that the loveliest