II

Summary

It was notable, she was afterwards to recognise, 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 himstrike 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’mblest 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 surprised her till he explained that every one in New York knew by appearance a young man of his so quoted wealth (“What did she take themall in New York then for?”) and of whose marked attention to her he hadmoreover, for himself, round at clubs and places, lately heard. This had accompanied the inevitable free question “Was she engaged to him now?”—which she had in fact almost welcomed as holding out to her the perch of opportunity.