since I should be ashamed to be anything else. If I could be good to
him now I should be glad--that's just what, a while ago, I rushed up
to him here, after so long, to give myself the pleasure of saying. I
saw him years ago very particularly, very miserably tried--and I saw
the way he took it. I did see it, you dear man," she sublimely went
on--"I saw it for all you may protest, for all you may hate me to talk
about you! I saw you behave like a gentleman--since Mrs. Drack agrees
with me, so charmingly, that there are not many to be met. I don't
know whether you care, Mrs. Drack"--she abounded, she revelled in
the name--"but I've always remembered it of him: that under the most
extraordinary provocation he was decent and patient and brave. No
appearance of anything different matters, for I speak of what I
_know_. Of course I'm nothing and nobody; I'm only a poor frivolous
girl, but I was very close to him at the time. That's all my little
story--if it _should_ interest you at all." She measured every beat of
her wing, she knew how high she was going and paused only when it was
quite vertiginous. Here she hung a moment as in the glare of the upper
blue; which was but the glare--what else could it be?--of the vast and
magnificent attention of both her auditors, hushed, on their side, in
the splendor she emitted. She had at last to steady herself, and
she scarce knew afterward at what rate or in what way she had still
inimitably come down--her own eyes fixed all the while on the very
figure of her achievement. She had sacrificed her mother on the
altar--proclaimed her as false and cruel: and if that didn't "fix" Mr.
Pitman, as he would have said--well, it was all she could do. But the
cost of her action already somehow came back to her with increase; the
dear gaunt man fairly wavered, to her sight, in the glory of it, as if
signalling at her, with wild gleeful arms, from some mount of safety,
while the massive lady just spread and spread like a rich fluid a bit
helplessly spilt. It was really the outflow of the poor woman's