performance he had surely never before waited for, or been indebted
to, from any one; and then, so knowing, he would charmingly endeavor
to "meet," to oblige and to gratify. He would find it, her case, ever
so worthy of his benevolence, and would be literally inspired to
reflect that he must hear about it first.

She let him hear then everything, in spite of feeling herself slip,
while she did so, to some doom as yet incalculable; she went on very
much as she had done for Mr. Pitman and Mrs. Drack, with the rage
of desperation and, as she was afterward to call it to herself, the
fascination of the abyss. She didn't know, couldn't have said at the
time, _why_ his projected benevolence should have had most so the
virtue to scare her: he would patronize her, as an effect of her
vividness, if not of her charm, and would do this with all high
intention, finding her case, or rather _their_ case, their funny old
case, taking on of a sudden such refreshing and edifying life, to
the last degree curious and even important; but there were gaps of
connection between this and the intensity of the perception here
overtaking her that she shouldn't be able to move in _any_ direction
without dishing herself. That she couldn't afford it where she had got
to--couldn't afford the deplorable vulgarity of having been so many
times informally affianced and contracted (putting it only at that, at
its being by the new lights and fashions so unpardonably vulgar): he
took this from her without turning, as she might have said, a hair;
except just to indicate, with his new superiority, that he felt the
distinguished appeal and notably the pathos of it. He still took
it from her that she hoped nothing, as it were, from any other
_alibi_--the people to drag into court being too many and too
scattered; but that, as it was with him, Murray Brush, she had been
_most_ vulgar, most everything she had better not have been, so she