It made a queer relation for her; a relation that struck her at this moment as less edifying, less natural and graceful than it would have been even for her remarkable motherand still in spite of this parent's third marriage, her union with Mr. Connery, from whom she was informally separated.

It was at the back of Julia's head as she approached Mr. Pitman, or it was at least somewhere deep within her soul, that if this last of Mrs. Connery's withdrawals from the matrimonial yoke had received the sanction of the court (Julia had always heard, from far back, so much about the "Court")

Julia had remembered him as old, since she had so constantly thought of her mother as old; which Mrs. Connery was indeed nowfor her daughterwith her

She had never doubted of his probable faultswhich her mother had vividly depicted as the basest of vices; since some of them, and the most obvious (not the vices, but the faults) were written on him as he stood there: notably, for instance, the exasperating "business slackness" of which Mrs. Connery had, before the tribunal, made so pathetically much.

She was sure even then of this, that he wouldn't put to her a query about his former wife, that he took to-day no grain of interest in Mrs. Connery; that his interest, such as it wasand he couldn't look quite like that, to Julia Bride's expert perception, without something in the nature of a new onewould be a thousand times different.

It cost her so little to recognize in Mrs. Connery at forty-seven, and in spite, or perhaps indeed just by reason, of the arranged silver tendrils which were so like some rare bird's-nest in a morning frost, a facile supremacy for the dazzling effectit cost her so little that her view even rather exaggerated the lustre of the different maternal items.

These things had been the "points" of antelope and zebra; putting Mrs. Connery for the zebra, as the more remarkably striped or spotted.

The fools we were capable of beingwell, you know better than any one: unless perhaps not quite so well as Mr. Connery.

Connery has gone to China.

She wouldn't have been the least ashamed, had their connection lasted, of going about with him: so that what a fool, again, her mother had beensince Mr. Connery, sorry as one might be for him, was irrepressibly vulgar.