There was only a moment during which, by a particular lustrous look she had never had from him before, he just made her wonder which turn he was going to take; she felt, however, as safe as was consistent with her sense of having probably but added to her danger, when he brought out, the next instant: "Don't you seem to take the ground that we were guilty--that _you_ were ever guilty--of something we shouldn't have been? What did we ever do that was secret, or underhand, or any way not to be acknowledged? What did we do but exchange our young vows with the best faith in the world--publicly, rejoicingly, with the full assent of every one connected with us? I mean of course," he said with his grave kind smile, "till we broke off so completely because we found that--practically, financially, on the hard worldly basis--we couldn't work it. What harm, in the sight of God or man, Julia," he asked in his fine rich way, "did we ever do?" She gave him back his look, turning pale. "Am I talking of _that_? Am 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--!