I talking of what _we_ know? I'm talking of what others feel--of what
they _have_ to feel; of what it's just enough for them to know not to
be able to get over it, once they do really know it. How do they know
what _didn't_ pass between us, with all the opportunities we had?
That's none of their business--if we were idiots enough, on the top of
everything! What you may or mayn't have done doesn't count, for _you_;
but there are people for whom it's loathsome that a girl should have
gone on like that from one person to another and still pretend to
be--well, all that a nice girl is supposed to be. It's as if we had
but just waked up, mother and I, to such a remarkable prejudice; and
now we have it--when we could do so well without it!--staring us
in the face. That mother should have insanely _let_ me, should so
vulgarly have taken it for my natural, my social career--_that's_ the
disgusting, humiliating thing: with the lovely account it gives of
both of us! But mother's view of a delicacy in things!" she went on
with scathing grimness; "mother's measure of anything, with her grand
'gained cases' (there'll be another yet, she finds them so easy!) of
which she's so publicly proud! You see I've no margin," said Julia;
letting him take it from her flushed face as much as he would that her
mother hadn't left her an inch. It was that he should make use of the
spade with her for the restoration of a bit of a margin just wide
enough to perch on till the tide of peril should have ebbed a little,
it was that he should give her _that_ lift--!

Well, it was all there from him after these last words; it was before
her that he really took hold. "Oh, my dear child, I can see! Of course
there are people--ideas change in our society so fast!--who are not in
sympathy with the old American freedom and who read, I dare say, all
sorts of uncanny things into it. Naturally you must take them as they
are--from the moment," said Murray Brush, who had lighted, by her