without far consequences at the time, had yet at this juncture so much better not have been. She could have worked it out at her leisure, to the last link of the chain, the way their prettiness had set them trap after trap, all along--had foredoomed them to awful ineptitude. When you were as pretty as that you could, by the whole idiotic consensus, be nothing _but_ pretty; and when you were nothing "but" pretty you could get into nothing but tight places, out of which you could then scramble by nothing but masses of fibs. And there was no one, all the while, who wasn't eager to egg you on, eager to make you pay to the last cent the price of your beauty. What creature would ever for a moment help you to behave as if something that dragged in its wake a bit less of a lumbering train would, on the whole, have been better for you? The consequences of being plain were only negative--you failed of this and that; but the consequences of being as _they_ were, what were these but endless? though indeed, as far as failing went, your beauty too could let you in for enough of it. Who, at all events, would ever for a moment credit you, in the luxuriance of that beauty, with the study, on your own side, of such truths as these? Julia Bride could, at the point she had reached, positively ask herself this even while lucidly conscious of the inimitable, the triumphant and attested projection, all round her, of her exquisite image. It was only Basil French who had at last, in his doubtless dry, but all distinguished way--the way surely, as it was borne in upon her, of all the blood of all the Frenches--stepped out of the vulgar rank. It was only he who, by the trouble she discerned in him, had made her see certain things. It was only for him--and not a bit ridiculously, but just beautifully, almost sublimely--that their being "nice," her mother and she between them, had _not_ seemed to profit by their being so furiously handsome.