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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1144 ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+In the Cage
+
+by Henry James
+
+
+Contents
+
+ I.
+ II.
+ III.
+ IV.
+ V.
+ VI.
+ VII.
+ VIII.
+ IX.
+ X.
+ XI.
+ XII.
+ XIII.
+ XIV.
+ XV.
+ XVI.
+ XVII.
+ XVIII.
+ XIX.
+ XX.
+ XXI.
+ XXII.
+ XXIII.
+ XXIV.
+ XXV.
+ XXVI.
+ XXVII.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+It had occurred to her early that in her position—that of a young
+person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a
+guinea-pig or a magpie—she should know a great many persons without
+their recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more
+lively—though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity
+still very much smothered—to see any one come in whom she knew outside,
+as she called it, any one who could add anything to the meanness of her
+function. Her function was to sit there with two young men—the other
+telegraphist and the counter-clerk; to mind the “sounder,” which was
+always going, to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters,
+answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, more than anything
+else, count words as numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of
+the telegrams thrust, from morning to night, through the gap left in
+the high lattice, across the encumbered shelf that her forearm ached
+with rubbing. This transparent screen fenced out or fenced in,
+according to the side of the narrow counter on which the human lot was
+cast, the duskiest corner of a shop pervaded not a little, in winter,
+by the poison of perpetual gas, and at all times by the presence of
+hams, cheese, dried fish, soap, varnish, paraffin and other solids and
+fluids that she came to know perfectly by their smells without
+consenting to know them by their names.
+
+The barrier that divided the little post-and-telegraph-office from the
+grocery was a frail structure of wood and wire; but the social, the
+professional separation was a gulf that fortune, by a stroke quite
+remarkable, had spared her the necessity of contributing at all
+publicly to bridge. When Mr. Cocker’s young men stepped over from
+behind the other counter to change a five-pound note—and Mr. Cocker’s
+situation, with the cream of the “Court Guide” and the dearest
+furnished apartments, Simpkin’s, Ladle’s, Thrupp’s, just round the
+corner, was so select that his place was quite pervaded by the crisp
+rustle of these emblems—she pushed out the sovereigns as if the
+applicant were no more to her than one of the momentary, the
+practically featureless, appearances in the great procession; and this
+perhaps all the more from the very fact of the connexion (only
+recognised outside indeed) to which she had lent herself with
+ridiculous inconsequence. She recognised the others the less because
+she had at last so unreservedly, so irredeemably, recognised Mr. Mudge.
+However that might be, she was a little ashamed of having to admit to
+herself that Mr. Mudge’s removal to a higher sphere—to a more
+commanding position, that is, though to a much lower
+neighbourhood—would have been described still better as a luxury than
+as the mere simplification, the corrected awkwardness, that she
+contented herself with calling it. He had at any rate ceased to be all
+day long in her eyes, and this left something a little fresh for them
+to rest on of a Sunday. During the three months of his happy survival
+at Cocker’s after her consent to their engagement she had often asked
+herself what it was marriage would be able to add to a familiarity that
+seemed already to have scraped the platter so clean. Opposite there,
+behind the counter of which his superior stature, his whiter apron, his
+more clustering curls and more present, too present, _h_’s had been for
+a couple of years the principal ornament, he had moved to and fro
+before her as on the small sanded floor of their contracted future. She
+was conscious now of the improvement of not having to take her present
+and her future at once. They were about as much as she could manage
+when taken separate.
+
+She had, none the less, to give her mind steadily to what Mr. Mudge had
+again written her about, the idea of her applying for a transfer to an
+office quite similar—she couldn’t yet hope for a place in a
+bigger—under the very roof where he was foreman, so that, dangled
+before her every minute of the day, he should see her, as he called it,
+“hourly,” and in a part, the far N.W. district, where, with her mother,
+she would save on their two rooms alone nearly three shillings. It
+would be far from dazzling to exchange Mayfair for Chalk Farm, and it
+wore upon her much that he could never drop a subject; still, it didn’t
+wear as things _had_ worn, the worries of the early times of their
+great misery, her own, her mother’s and her elder sister’s—the last of
+whom had succumbed to all but absolute want when, as conscious and
+incredulous ladies, suddenly bereft, betrayed, overwhelmed, they had
+slipped faster and faster down the steep slope at the bottom of which
+she alone had rebounded. Her mother had never rebounded any more at the
+bottom than on the way; had only rumbled and grumbled down and down,
+making, in respect of caps, topics and “habits,” no effort
+whatever—which simply meant smelling much of the time of whiskey.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+It was always rather quiet at Cocker’s while the contingent from
+Ladle’s and Thrupp’s and all the other great places were at luncheon,
+or, as the young men used vulgarly to say, while the animals were
+feeding. She had forty minutes in advance of this to go home for her
+own dinner; and when she came back and one of the young men took his
+turn there was often half an hour during which she could pull out a bit
+of work or a book—a book from the place where she borrowed novels, very
+greasy, in fine print and all about fine folks, at a ha’penny a day.
+This sacred pause was one of the numerous ways in which the
+establishment kept its finger on the pulse of fashion and fell into the
+rhythm of the larger life. It had something to do, one day, with the
+particular flare of importance of an arriving customer, a lady whose
+meals were apparently irregular, yet whom she was destined, she
+afterwards found, not to forget. The girl was _blasée;_ nothing could
+belong more, as she perfectly knew, to the intense publicity of her
+profession; but she had a whimsical mind and wonderful nerves; she was
+subject, in short, to sudden flickers of antipathy and sympathy, red
+gleams in the grey, fitful needs to notice and to “care,” odd caprices
+of curiosity. She had a friend who had invented a new career for
+women—that of being in and out of people’s houses to look after the
+flowers. Mrs. Jordan had a manner of her own of sounding this allusion;
+“the flowers,” on her lips, were, in fantastic places, in happy homes,
+as usual as the coals or the daily papers. She took charge of them, at
+any rate, in all the rooms, at so much a month, and people were quickly
+finding out what it was to make over this strange burden of the
+pampered to the widow of a clergyman. The widow, on her side, dilating
+on the initiations thus opened up to her, had been splendid to her
+young friend, over the way she was made free of the greatest houses—the
+way, especially when she did the dinner-tables, set out so often for
+twenty, she felt that a single step more would transform her whole
+social position. On its being asked of her then if she circulated only
+in a sort of tropical solitude, with the upper servants for picturesque
+natives, and on her having to assent to this glance at her limitations,
+she had found a reply to the girl’s invidious question. “You’ve no
+imagination, my dear!”—that was because a door more than half open to
+the higher life couldn’t be called anything but a thin partition. Mrs.
+Jordan’s imagination quite did away with the thickness.
+
+Our young lady had not taken up the charge, had dealt with it
+good-humouredly, just because she knew so well what to think of it. It
+was at once one of her most cherished complaints and most secret
+supports that people didn’t understand her, and it was accordingly a
+matter of indifference to her that Mrs. Jordan shouldn’t; even though
+Mrs. Jordan, handed down from their early twilight of gentility and
+also the victim of reverses, was the only member of her circle in whom
+she recognised an equal. She was perfectly aware that her imaginative
+life was the life in which she spent most of her time; and she would
+have been ready, had it been at all worth while, to contend that, since
+her outward occupation didn’t kill it, it must be strong indeed.
+Combinations of flowers and green-stuff, forsooth! What _she_ could
+handle freely, she said to herself, was combinations of men and women.
+The only weakness in her faculty came from the positive abundance of
+her contact with the human herd; this was so constant, it had so the
+effect of cheapening her privilege, that there were long stretches in
+which inspiration, divination and interest quite dropped. The great
+thing was the flashes, the quick revivals, absolute accidents all, and
+neither to be counted on nor to be resisted. Some one had only
+sometimes to put in a penny for a stamp and the whole thing was upon
+her. She was so absurdly constructed that these were literally the
+moments that made up—made up for the long stiffness of sitting there in
+the stocks, made up for the cunning hostility of Mr. Buckton and the
+importunate sympathy of the counter-clerk, made up for the daily deadly
+flourishy letter from Mr. Mudge, made up even for the most haunting of
+her worries, the rage at moments of not knowing how her mother did “get
+it.”
+
+She had surrendered herself moreover of late to a certain expansion of
+her consciousness; something that seemed perhaps vulgarly accounted for
+by the fact that, as the blast of the season roared louder and the
+waves of fashion tossed their spray further over the counter, there
+were more impressions to be gathered and really—for it came to
+that—more life to be led. Definite at any rate it was that by the time
+May was well started the kind of company she kept at Cocker’s had begun
+to strike her as a reason—a reason she might almost put forward for a
+policy of procrastination. It sounded silly, of course, as yet, to
+plead such a motive, especially as the fascination of the place was
+after all a sort of torment. But she liked her torment; it was a
+torment she should miss at Chalk Farm. She was ingenious and uncandid,
+therefore, about leaving the breadth of London a little longer between
+herself and that austerity. If she hadn’t quite the courage in short to
+say to Mr. Mudge that her actual chance for a play of mind was worth
+any week the three shillings he desired to help her to save, she yet
+saw something happen in the course of the month that in her heart of
+hearts at least answered the subtle question. This was connected
+precisely with the appearance of the memorable lady.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+She pushed in three bescribbled forms which the girl’s hand was quick
+to appropriate, Mr. Buckton having so frequent a perverse instinct for
+catching first any eye that promised the sort of entertainment with
+which she had her peculiar affinity. The amusements of captives are
+full of a desperate contrivance, and one of our young friend’s
+ha’pennyworths had been the charming tale of _Picciola_. It was of
+course the law of the place that they were never to take no notice, as
+Mr. Buckton said, whom they served; but this also never prevented,
+certainly on the same gentleman’s own part, what he was fond of
+describing as the underhand game. Both her companions, for that matter,
+made no secret of the number of favourites they had among the ladies;
+sweet familiarities in spite of which she had repeatedly caught each of
+them in stupidities and mistakes, confusions of identity and lapses of
+observation that never failed to remind her how the cleverness of men
+ends where the cleverness of women begins. “Marguerite, Regent Street.
+Try on at six. All Spanish lace. Pearls. The full length.” That was the
+first; it had no signature. “Lady Agnes Orme, Hyde Park Place.
+Impossible to-night, dining Haddon. Opera to-morrow, promised Fritz,
+but could do play Wednesday. Will try Haddon for Savoy, and anything in
+the world you like, if you can get Gussy. Sunday Montenero. Sit Mason
+Monday, Tuesday. Marguerite awful. Cissy.” That was the second. The
+third, the girl noted when she took it, was on a foreign form:
+“Everard, Hôtel Brighton, Paris. Only understand and believe. 22nd to
+26th, and certainly 8th and 9th. Perhaps others. Come. Mary.”
+
+Mary was very handsome, the handsomest woman, she felt in a moment, she
+had ever seen—or perhaps it was only Cissy. Perhaps it was both, for
+she had seen stranger things than that—ladies wiring to different
+persons under different names. She had seen all sorts of things and
+pieced together all sorts of mysteries. There had once been one—not
+long before—who, without winking, sent off five over five different
+signatures. Perhaps these represented five different friends who had
+asked her—all women, just as perhaps now Mary and Cissy, or one or
+other of them, were wiring by deputy. Sometimes she put in too much—too
+much of her own sense; sometimes she put in too little; and in either
+case this often came round to her afterwards, for she had an
+extraordinary way of keeping clues. When she noticed she noticed; that
+was what it came to. There were days and days, there were weeks
+sometimes, of vacancy. This arose often from Mr. Buckton’s devilish and
+successful subterfuges for keeping her at the sounder whenever it
+looked as if anything might arouse; the sounder, which it was equally
+his business to mind, being the innermost cell of captivity, a cage
+within the cage, fenced oft from the rest by a frame of ground glass.
+The counter-clerk would have played into her hands; but the
+counter-clerk was really reduced to idiocy by the effect of his passion
+for her. She flattered herself moreover, nobly, that with the
+unpleasant conspicuity of this passion she would never have consented
+to be obliged to him. The most she would ever do would be always to
+shove off on him whenever she could the registration of letters, a job
+she happened particularly to loathe. After the long stupors, at all
+events, there almost always suddenly would come a sharp taste of
+something; it was in her mouth before she knew it; it was in her mouth
+now.
+
+To Cissy, to Mary, whichever it was, she found her curiosity going out
+with a rush, a mute effusion that floated back to her, like a returning
+tide, the living colour and splendour of the beautiful head, the light
+of eyes that seemed to reflect such utterly other things than the mean
+things actually before them; and, above all, the high curt
+consideration of a manner that even at bad moments was a magnificent
+habit and of the very essence of the innumerable things—her beauty, her
+birth, her father and mother, her cousins and all her ancestors—that
+its possessor couldn’t have got rid of even had she wished. How did our
+obscure little public servant know that for the lady of the telegrams
+this was a bad moment? How did she guess all sorts of impossible
+things, such as, almost on the very spot, the presence of drama at a
+critical stage and the nature of the tie with the gentleman at the
+Hôtel Brighton? More than ever before it floated to her through the
+bars of the cage that this at last was the high reality, the bristling
+truth that she had hitherto only patched up and eked out—one of the
+creatures, in fine, in whom all the conditions for happiness actually
+met, and who, in the air they made, bloomed with an unwitting
+insolence. What came home to the girl was the way the insolence was
+tempered by something that was equally a part of the distinguished
+life, the custom of a flowerlike bend to the less fortunate—a dropped
+fragrance, a mere quick breath, but which in fact pervaded and
+lingered. The apparition was very young, but certainly married, and our
+fatigued friend had a sufficient store of mythological comparison to
+recognise the port of Juno. Marguerite might be “awful,” but she knew
+how to dress a goddess.
+
+Pearls and Spanish lace—she herself, with assurance, could see them,
+and the “full length” too, and also red velvet bows, which, disposed on
+the lace in a particular manner (she could have placed them with the
+turn of a hand) were of course to adorn the front of a black brocade
+that would be like a dress in a picture. However, neither Marguerite
+nor Lady Agnes nor Haddon nor Fritz nor Gussy was what the wearer of
+this garment had really come in for. She had come in for Everard—and
+that was doubtless not his true name either. If our young lady had
+never taken such jumps before it was simply that she had never before
+been so affected. She went all the way. Mary and Cissy had been round
+together, in their single superb person, to see him—he must live round
+the corner; they had found that, in consequence of something they had
+come, precisely, to make up for or to have another scene about, he had
+gone off—gone off just on purpose to make them feel it; on which they
+had come together to Cocker’s as to the nearest place; where they had
+put in the three forms partly in order not to put in the one alone. The
+two others in a manner, covered it, muffled it, passed it off. Oh yes,
+she went all the way, and this was a specimen of how she often went.
+She would know the hand again any time. It was as handsome and as
+everything else as the woman herself. The woman herself had, on
+learning his flight, pushed past Everard’s servant and into his room;
+she had written her missive at his table and with his pen. All this,
+every inch of it, came in the waft that she blew through and left
+behind her, the influence that, as I have said, lingered. And among the
+things the girl was sure of, happily, was that she should see her
+again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+She saw her in fact, and only ten days later; but this time not alone,
+and that was exactly a part of the luck of it. Not unaware—as how could
+her observation have left her so?—of the possibilities through which it
+could range, our young lady had ever since had in her mind a dozen
+conflicting theories about Everard’s type; as to which, the instant
+they came into the place, she felt the point settled with a thump that
+seemed somehow addressed straight to her heart. That organ literally
+beat faster at the approach of the gentleman who was this time with
+Cissy, and who, as seen from within the cage, became on the spot the
+happiest of the happy circumstances with which her mind had invested
+the friend of Fritz and Gussy. He was a very happy circumstance indeed
+as, with his cigarette in his lips and his broken familiar talk caught
+by his companion, he put down the half-dozen telegrams it would take
+them together several minutes to dispatch. And here it occurred, oddly
+enough, that if, shortly before the girl’s interest in his companion
+had sharpened her sense for the messages then transmitted, her
+immediate vision of himself had the effect, while she counted his
+seventy words, of preventing intelligibility. _His_ words were mere
+numbers, they told her nothing whatever; and after he had gone she was
+in possession of no name, of no address, of no meaning, of nothing but
+a vague sweet sound and an immense impression. He had been there but
+five minutes, he had smoked in her face, and, busy with his telegrams,
+with the tapping pencil and the conscious danger, the odious betrayal
+that would come from a mistake, she had had no wandering glances nor
+roundabout arts to spare. Yet she had taken him in; she knew
+everything; she had made up her mind.
+
+He had come back from Paris; everything was re-arranged; the pair were
+again shoulder to shoulder in their high encounter with life, their
+large and complicated game. The fine soundless pulse of this game was
+in the air for our young woman while they remained in the shop. While
+they remained? They remained all day; their presence continued and
+abode with her, was in everything she did till nightfall, in the
+thousands of other words she counted, she transmitted, in all the
+stamps she detached and the letters she weighed and the change she
+gave, equally unconscious and unerring in each of these particulars,
+and not, as the run on the little office thickened with the afternoon
+hours, looking up at a single ugly face in the long sequence, nor
+really hearing the stupid questions that she patiently and perfectly
+answered. All patience was possible now, all questions were stupid
+after his, all faces were ugly. She had been sure she should see the
+lady again; and even now she should perhaps, she should probably, see
+her often. But for him it was totally different; she should never never
+see him. She wanted it too much. There was a kind of wanting that
+helped—she had arrived, with her rich experience, at that
+generalisation; and there was another kind that was fatal. It was this
+time the fatal kind; it would prevent.
+
+Well, she saw him the very next day, and on this second occasion it was
+quite different; the sense of every syllable he paid for was fiercely
+distinct; she indeed felt her progressive pencil, dabbing as if with a
+quick caress the marks of his own, put life into every stroke. He was
+there a long time—had not brought his forms filled out but worked them
+off in a nook on the counter; and there were other people as well—a
+changing pushing cluster, with every one to mind at once and endless
+right change to make and information to produce. But she kept hold of
+him throughout; she continued, for herself, in a relation with him as
+close as that in which, behind the hated ground glass, Mr. Buckton
+luckily continued with the sounder. This morning everything changed,
+but rather to dreariness; she had to swallow the rebuff to her theory
+about fatal desires, which she did without confusion and indeed with
+absolute levity; yet if it was now flagrant that he did live close at
+hand—at Park Chambers—and belonged supremely to the class that wired
+everything, even their expensive feelings (so that, as he never wrote,
+his correspondence cost him weekly pounds and pounds, and he might be
+in and out five times a day) there was, all the same, involved in the
+prospect, and by reason of its positive excess of light, a perverse
+melancholy, a gratuitous misery. This was at once to give it a place in
+an order of feelings on which I shall presently touch.
+
+Meanwhile, for a month, he was very constant. Cissy, Mary, never
+re-appeared with him; he was always either alone or accompanied only by
+some gentleman who was lost in the blaze of his glory. There was
+another sense, however—and indeed there was more than one—in which she
+mostly found herself counting in the splendid creature with whom she
+had originally connected him. He addressed this correspondent neither
+as Mary nor as Cissy; but the girl was sure of whom it was, in Eaten
+Square, that he was perpetually wiring to—and all so irreproachably!—as
+Lady Bradeen. Lady Bradeen was Cissy, Lady Bradeen was Mary, Lady
+Bradeen was the friend of Fritz and of Gussy, the customer of
+Marguerite, and the close ally in short (as was ideally right, only the
+girl had not yet found a descriptive term that was) of the most
+magnificent of men. Nothing could equal the frequency and variety of
+his communications to her ladyship but their extraordinary, their
+abysmal propriety. It was just the talk—so profuse sometimes that she
+wondered what was left for their real meetings—of the very happiest
+people. Their real meetings must have been constant, for half of it was
+appointments and allusions, all swimming in a sea of other allusions
+still, tangled in a complexity of questions that gave a wondrous image
+of their life. If Lady Bradeen was Juno it was all certainly Olympian.
+If the girl, missing the answers, her ladyship’s own outpourings,
+vainly reflected that Cocker’s should have been one of the bigger
+offices where telegrams arrived as well as departed, there were yet
+ways in which, on the whole, she pressed the romance closer by reason
+of the very quantity of imagination it demanded and consumed. The days
+and hours of this new friend, as she came to account him, were at all
+events unrolled, and however much more she might have known she would
+still have wished to go beyond. In fact she did go beyond; she went
+quite far enough.
+
+But she could none the less, even after a month, scarce have told if
+the gentlemen who came in with him recurred or changed; and this in
+spite of the fact that they too were always posting and wiring, smoking
+in her face and signing or not signing. The gentlemen who came in with
+him were nothing when he was there. They turned up alone at other
+times—then only perhaps with a dim richness of reference. He himself,
+absent as well as present, was all. He was very tall, very fair, and
+had, in spite of his thick preoccupations, a good-humour that was
+exquisite, particularly as it so often had the effect of keeping him
+on. He could have reached over anybody, and anybody—no matter who—would
+have let him; but he was so extraordinarily kind that he quite
+pathetically waited, never waggling things at her out of his turn nor
+saying “Here!” with horrid sharpness. He waited for pottering old
+ladies, for gaping slaveys, for the perpetual Buttonses from Thrupp’s;
+and the thing in all this that she would have liked most unspeakably to
+put to the test was the possibility of her having for him a personal
+identity that might in a particular way appeal. There were moments when
+he actually struck her as on her side, as arranging to help, to
+support, to spare her.
+
+But such was the singular spirit of our young friend that she could
+remind herself with a pang that when people had awfully good
+manners—people of that class,—you couldn’t tell. These manners were for
+everybody, and it might be drearily unavailing for any poor particular
+body to be overworked and unusual. What he did take for granted was all
+sorts of facility; and his high pleasantness, his relighting of
+cigarettes while he waited, his unconscious bestowal of opportunities,
+of boons, of blessings, were all a part of his splendid security, the
+instinct that told him there was nothing such an existence as his could
+ever lose by. He was somehow all at once very bright and very grave,
+very young and immensely complete; and whatever he was at any moment it
+was always as much as all the rest the mere bloom of his beatitude. He
+was sometimes Everard, as he had been at the Hôtel Brighton, and he was
+sometimes Captain Everard. He was sometimes Philip with his surname and
+sometimes Philip without it. In some directions he was merely Phil, in
+others he was merely Captain. There were relations in which he was none
+of these things, but a quite different person—“the Count.” There were
+several friends for whom he was William. There were several for whom,
+in allusion perhaps to his complexion, he was “the Pink ‘Un.” Once,
+once only by good luck, he had, coinciding comically, quite
+miraculously, with another person also near to her, been “Mudge.” Yes,
+whatever he was, it was a part of his happiness—whatever he was and
+probably whatever he wasn’t. And his happiness was a part—it became so
+little by little—of something that, almost from the first of her being
+at Cocker’s, had been deeply with the girl.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+This was neither more nor less than the queer extension of her
+experience, the double life that, in the cage, she grew at last to
+lead. As the weeks went on there she lived more and more into the world
+of whiffs and glimpses, she found her divinations work faster and
+stretch further. It was a prodigious view as the pressure heightened, a
+panorama fed with facts and figures, flushed with a torrent of colour
+and accompanied with wondrous world-music. What it mainly came to at
+this period was a picture of how London could amuse itself; and that,
+with the running commentary of a witness so exclusively a witness,
+turned for the most part to a hardening of the heart. The nose of this
+observer was brushed by the bouquet, yet she could never really pluck
+even a daisy. What could still remain fresh in her daily grind was the
+immense disparity, the difference and contrast, from class to class, of
+every instant and every motion. There were times when all the wires in
+the country seemed to start from the little hole-and-corner where she
+plied for a livelihood, and where, in the shuffle of feet, the flutter
+of “forms,” the straying of stamps and the ring of change over the
+counter, the people she had fallen into the habit of remembering and
+fitting together with others, and of having her theories and
+interpretations of, kept up before her their long procession and
+rotation. What twisted the knife in her vitals was the way the
+profligate rich scattered about them, in extravagant chatter over their
+extravagant pleasures and sins, an amount of money that would have held
+the stricken household of her frightened childhood, her poor pinched
+mother and tormented father and lost brother and starved sister,
+together for a lifetime. During her first weeks she had often gasped at
+the sums people were willing to pay for the stuff they transmitted—the
+“much love”s, the “awful” regrets, the compliments and wonderments and
+vain vague gestures that cost the price of a new pair of boots. She had
+had a way then of glancing at the people’s faces, but she had early
+learnt that if you became a telegraphist you soon ceased to be
+astonished. Her eye for types amounted nevertheless to genius, and
+there were those she liked and those she hated, her feeling for the
+latter of which grew to a positive possession, an instinct of
+observation and detection. There were the brazen women, as she called
+them, of the higher and the lower fashion, whose squanderings and
+graspings, whose struggles and secrets and love-affairs and lies, she
+tracked and stored up against them till she had at moments, in private,
+a triumphant vicious feeling of mastery and ease, a sense of carrying
+their silly guilty secrets in her pocket, her small retentive brain,
+and thereby knowing so much more about them than they suspected or
+would care to think. There were those she would have liked to betray,
+to trip up, to bring down with words altered and fatal; and all through
+a personal hostility provoked by the lightest signs, by their accidents
+of tone and manner, by the particular kind of relation she always
+happened instantly to feel.
+
+There were impulses of various kinds, alternately soft and severe, to
+which she was constitutionally accessible and which were determined by
+the smallest accidents. She was rigid in general on the article of
+making the public itself affix its stamps, and found a special
+enjoyment in dealing to that end with some of the ladies who were too
+grand to touch them. She had thus a play of refinement and subtlety
+greater, she flattered herself, than any of which she could be made the
+subject; and though most people were too stupid to be conscious of this
+it brought her endless small consolations and revenges. She recognised
+quite as much those of her sex whom she would have liked to help, to
+warn, to rescue, to see more of; and that alternative as well operated
+exactly through the hazard of personal sympathy, her vision for silver
+threads and moonbeams and her gift for keeping the clues and finding
+her way in the tangle. The moonbeams and silver threads presented at
+moments all the vision of what poor _she_ might have made of happiness.
+Blurred and blank as the whole thing often inevitably, or mercifully,
+became, she could still, through crevices and crannies, be stupefied,
+especially by what, in spite of all seasoning, touched the sorest place
+in her consciousness, the revelation of the golden shower flying about
+without a gleam of gold for herself. It remained prodigious to the end,
+the money her fine friends were able to spend to get still more, or
+even to complain to fine friends of their own that they were in want.
+The pleasures they proposed were equalled only by those they declined,
+and they made their appointments often so expensively that she was left
+wondering at the nature of the delights to which the mere approaches
+were so paved with shillings. She quivered on occasion into the
+perception of this and that one whom she would on the chance have just
+simply liked to _be_. Her conceit, her baffled vanity, was possibly
+monstrous; she certainly often threw herself into a defiant conviction
+that she would have done the whole thing much better. But her greatest
+comfort, mostly, was her comparative vision of the men; by whom I mean
+the unmistakeable gentlemen, for she had no interest in the spurious or
+the shabby and no mercy at all for the poor. She could have found a
+sixpence, outside, for an appearance of want; but her fancy, in some
+directions so alert, had never a throb of response for any sign of the
+sordid. The men she did track, moreover, she tracked mainly in one
+relation, the relation as to which the cage convinced her, she
+believed, more than anything else could have done, that it was quite
+the most diffused.
+
+She found her ladies, in short, almost always in communication with her
+gentlemen, and her gentlemen with her ladies, and she read into the
+immensity of their intercourse stories and meanings without end.
+Incontestably she grew to think that the men cut the best figure; and
+in this particular, as in many others, she arrived at a philosophy of
+her own, all made up of her private notations and cynicisms. It was a
+striking part of the business, for example, that it was much more the
+women, on the whole, who were after the men than the men who were after
+the women: it was literally visible that the general attitude of the
+one sex was that of the object pursued and defensive, apologetic and
+attenuating, while the light of her own nature helped her more or less
+to conclude as to the attitude of the other. Perhaps she herself a
+little even fell into the custom of pursuit in occasionally deviating
+only for gentlemen from her high rigour about the stamps. She had early
+in the day made up her mind, in fine, that they had the best manners;
+and if there were none of them she noticed when Captain Everard was
+there, there were plenty she could place and trace and name at other
+times, plenty who, with their way of being “nice” to her, and of
+handling, as if their pockets were private tills loose mixed masses of
+silver and gold, were such pleasant appearances that she could envy
+them without dislike. _They_ never had to give change—they only had to
+get it. They ranged through every suggestion, every shade of fortune,
+which evidently included indeed lots of bad luck as well as of good,
+declining even toward Mr. Mudge and his bland firm thrift, and
+ascending, in wild signals and rocket-flights, almost to within hail of
+her highest standard. So from month to month she went on with them all,
+through a thousand ups and downs and a thousand pangs and
+indifferences. What virtually happened was that in the shuffling herd
+that passed before her by far the greater part only passed—a proportion
+but just appreciable stayed. Most of the elements swam straight away,
+lost themselves in the bottomless common, and by so doing really kept
+the page clear. On the clearness therefore what she did retain stood
+sharply out; she nipped and caught it, turned it over and interwove it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+She met Mrs. Jordan when she could, and learned from her more and more
+how the great people, under her gentle shake and after going through
+everything with the mere shops, were waking up to the gain of putting
+into the hands of a person of real refinement the question that the
+shop-people spoke of so vulgarly as that of the floral decorations. The
+regular dealers in these decorations were all very well; but there was
+a peculiar magic in the play of taste of a lady who had only to
+remember, through whatever intervening dusk, all her own little tables,
+little bowls and little jars and little other arrangements, and the
+wonderful thing she had made of the garden of the vicarage. This small
+domain, which her young friend had never seen, bloomed in Mrs. Jordan’s
+discourse like a new Eden, and she converted the past into a bank of
+violets by the tone in which she said “Of course you always knew my one
+passion!” She obviously met now, at any rate, a big contemporary need,
+measured what it was rapidly becoming for people to feel they could
+trust her without a tremor. It brought them a peace that—during the
+quarter of an hour before dinner in especial—was worth more to them
+than mere payment could express. Mere payment, none the less, was
+tolerably prompt; she engaged by the month, taking over the whole
+thing; and there was an evening on which, in respect to our heroine,
+she at last returned to the charge. “It’s growing and growing, and I
+see that I must really divide the work. One wants an associate—of one’s
+own kind, don’t you know? You know the look they want it all to
+have?—of having come, not from a florist, but from one of themselves.
+Well, I’m sure _you_ could give it—because you _are_ one. Then we
+_should_ win. Therefore just come in with me.”
+
+“And leave the P.O.?”
+
+“Let the P.O. simply bring you your letters. It would bring you lots,
+you’d see: orders, after a bit, by the score.” It was on this, in due
+course, that the great advantage again came up: “One seems to live
+again with one’s own people.” It had taken some little time (after
+their having parted company in the tempest of their troubles and then,
+in the glimmering dawn, finally sighted each other again) for each to
+admit that the other was, in her private circle, her only equal, but
+the admission came, when it did come, with an honest groan; and since
+equality was named, each found much personal profit in exaggerating the
+other’s original grandeur. Mrs. Jordan was ten years the older, but her
+young friend was struck with the smaller difference this now made: it
+had counted otherwise at the time when, much more as a friend of her
+mother’s, the bereaved lady, without a penny of provision and with
+stopgaps, like their own, all gone, had, across the sordid landing on
+which the opposite doors of the pair of scared miseries opened and to
+which they were bewilderedly bolted, borrowed coals and umbrellas that
+were repaid in potatoes and postage-stamps. It had been a questionable
+help, at that time, to ladies submerged, floundering, panting, swimming
+for their lives, that they were ladies; but such an advantage could
+come up again in proportion as others vanished, and it had grown very
+great by the time it was the only ghost of one they possessed. They had
+literally watched it take to itself a portion of the substance of each
+that had departed; and it became prodigious now, when they could talk
+of it together, when they could look back at it across a desert of
+accepted derogation, and when, above all, they could together work up a
+credulity about it that neither could otherwise work up. Nothing was
+really so marked as that they felt the need to cultivate this legend
+much more after having found their feet and stayed their stomachs in
+the ultimate obscure than they had done in the upper air of mere
+frequent shocks. The thing they could now oftenest say to each other
+was that they knew what they meant; and the sentiment with which, all
+round, they knew it was known had well-nigh amounted to a promise not
+again to fall apart.
+
+Mrs. Jordan was at present fairly dazzling on the subject of the way
+that, in the practice of her fairy art, as she called it, she more than
+peeped in—she penetrated. There was not a house of the great kind—and
+it was of course only a question of those, real homes of luxury—in
+which she was not, at the rate such people now had things, all over the
+place. The girl felt before the picture the cold breath of
+disinheritance as much as she had ever felt it in the cage; she knew
+moreover how much she betrayed this, for the experience of poverty had
+begun, in her life, too early, and her ignorance of the requirements of
+homes of luxury had grown, with other active knowledge, a depth of
+simplification. She had accordingly at first often found that in these
+colloquies she could only pretend she understood. Educated as she had
+rapidly been by her chances at Cocker’s, there were still strange gaps
+in her learning—she could never, like Mrs. Jordan, have found her way
+about one of the “homes.” Little by little, however, she had caught on,
+above all in the light of what Mrs. Jordan’s redemption had materially
+made of that lady, giving her, though the years and the struggles had
+naturally not straightened a feature, an almost super-eminent air.
+There were women in and out of Cocker’s who were quite nice and who yet
+didn’t look well; whereas Mrs. Jordan looked well and yet, with her
+extraordinarily protrusive teeth, was by no means quite nice. It would
+seem, mystifyingly, that it might really come from all the greatness
+she could live with. It was fine to hear her talk so often of dinners
+of twenty and of her doing, as she said, exactly as she liked with
+them. She spoke as if, for that matter, she invited the company. “They
+simply give me the table—all the rest, all the other effects, come
+afterwards.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+“Then you _do_ see them?” the girl again asked.
+
+Mrs. Jordan hesitated, and indeed the point had been ambiguous before.
+“Do you mean the guests?”
+
+Her young friend, cautious about an undue exposure of innocence, was
+not quite sure. “Well—the people who live there.”
+
+“Lady Ventnor? Mrs. Bubb? Lord Rye? Dear, yes. Why they _like_ one.”
+
+“But does one personally _know_ them?” our young lady went on, since
+that was the way to speak. “I mean socially, don’t you know?—as you
+know _me_.”
+
+“They’re not so nice as you!” Mrs. Jordan charmingly cried. “But I
+_shall_ see more and more of them.”
+
+Ah this was the old story. “But how soon?”
+
+“Why almost any day. Of course,” Mrs. Jordan honestly added, “they’re
+nearly always out.”
+
+“Then why do they want flowers all over?”
+
+“Oh that doesn’t make any difference.” Mrs. Jordan was not philosophic;
+she was just evidently determined it _shouldn’t_ make any. “They’re
+awfully interested in my ideas, and it’s inevitable they should meet me
+over them.”
+
+Her interlocutress was sturdy enough. “What do you call your ideas?”
+
+Mrs. Jordan’s reply was fine. “If you were to see me some day with a
+thousand tulips you’d discover.”
+
+“A thousand?”—the girl gaped at such a revelation of the scale of it;
+she felt for the instant fairly planted out. “Well, but if in fact they
+never do meet you?” she none the less pessimistically insisted.
+
+“Never? They _often_ do—and evidently quite on purpose. We have grand
+long talks.”
+
+There was something in our young lady that could still stay her from
+asking for a personal description of these apparitions; that showed too
+starved a state. But while she considered she took in afresh the whole
+of the clergyman’s widow. Mrs. Jordan couldn’t help her teeth, and her
+sleeves were a distinct rise in the world. A thousand tulips at a
+shilling clearly took one further than a thousand words at a penny; and
+the betrothed of Mr. Mudge, in whom the sense of the race for life was
+always acute, found herself wondering, with a twinge of her easy
+jealousy, if it mightn’t after all then, for _her_ also, be
+better—better than where she was—to follow some such scent. Where she
+was was where Mr. Buckton’s elbow could freely enter her right side and
+the counter-clerk’s breathing—he had something the matter with his
+nose—pervade her left ear. It was something to fill an office under
+Government, and she knew but too well there were places commoner still
+than Cocker’s; but it needed no great range of taste to bring home to
+her the picture of servitude and promiscuity she couldn’t but offer to
+the eye of comparative freedom. She was so boxed up with her young men,
+and anything like a margin so absent, that it needed more art than she
+should ever possess to pretend in the least to compass, with any one in
+the nature of an acquaintance—say with Mrs. Jordan herself, flying in,
+as it might happen, to wire sympathetically to Mrs. Bubb—an approach to
+a relation of elegant privacy. She remembered the day when Mrs. Jordan
+_had_, in fact, by the greatest chance, come in with fifty-three words
+for Lord Rye and a five-pound note to change. This had been the
+dramatic manner of their reunion—their mutual recognition was so great
+an event. The girl could at first only see her from the waist up,
+besides making but little of her long telegram to his lordship. It was
+a strange whirligig that had converted the clergyman’s widow into such
+a specimen of the class that went beyond the sixpence.
+
+Nothing of the occasion, all the more, had ever become dim; least of
+all the way that, as her recovered friend looked up from counting, Mrs.
+Jordan had just blown, in explanation, through her teeth and through
+the bars of the cage: “I _do_ flowers, you know.” Our young woman had
+always, with her little finger crooked out, a pretty movement for
+counting; and she had not forgotten the small secret advantage, a
+sharpness of triumph it might even have been called, that fell upon her
+at this moment and avenged her for the incoherence of the message, an
+unintelligible enumeration of numbers, colours, days, hours. The
+correspondence of people she didn’t know was one thing; but the
+correspondence of people she did had an aspect of its own for her even
+when she couldn’t understand it. The speech in which Mrs. Jordan had
+defined a position and announced a profession was like a tinkle of
+bluebells; but for herself her one idea about flowers was that people
+had them at funerals, and her present sole gleam of light was that
+lords probably had them most. When she watched, a minute later, through
+the cage, the swing of her visitor’s departing petticoats, she saw the
+sight from the waist down; and when the counter-clerk, after a mere
+male glance, remarked, with an intention unmistakeably low, “Handsome
+woman!” she had for him the finest of her chills: “She’s the widow of a
+bishop.” She always felt, with the counter-clerk, that it was
+impossible sufficiently to put it on; for what she wished to express to
+him was the maximum of her contempt, and that element in her nature was
+confusedly stored. “A bishop” was putting it on, but the
+counter-clerk’s approaches were vile. The night, after this, when, in
+the fulness of time, Mrs. Jordan mentioned the grand long talks, the
+girl at last brought out: “Should _I_ see them?—I mean if I _were_ to
+give up everything for you.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan at this became most arch. “I’d send you to all the
+bachelors!”
+
+Our young lady could be reminded by such a remark that she usually
+struck her friend as pretty. “Do _they_ have their flowers?”
+
+“Oceans. And they’re the most particular.” Oh it was a wonderful world.
+“You should see Lord Rye’s.”
+
+“His flowers?”
+
+“Yes, and his letters. He writes me pages on pages—with the most
+adorable little drawings and plans. You should see his diagrams!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+The girl had in course of time every opportunity to inspect these
+documents, and they a little disappointed her; but in the mean while
+there had been more talk, and it had led to her saying, as if her
+friend’s guarantee of a life of elegance were not quite definite:
+“Well, I see every one at _my_ place.”
+
+“Every one?”
+
+“Lots of swells. They flock. They live, you know, all round, and the
+place is filled with all the smart people, all the fast people, those
+whose names are in the papers—mamma has still The _Morning Post_—and
+who come up for the season.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan took this in with complete intelligence. “Yes, and I dare
+say it’s some of your people that _I_ do.”
+
+Her companion assented, but discriminated. “I doubt if you ‘do’ them as
+much as I! Their affairs, their appointments and arrangements, their
+little games and secrets and vices—those things all pass before me.”
+
+This was a picture that could make a clergyman’s widow not
+imperceptibly gasp; it was in intention moreover something of a retort
+to the thousand tulips. “Their vices? Have they got vices?”
+
+Our young critic even more overtly stared then with a touch of contempt
+in her amusement: “Haven’t you found _that_ out?” The homes of luxury
+then hadn’t so much to give. “_I_ find out everything.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan, at bottom a very meek person, was visibly struck. “I see.
+You do ‘have’ them.”
+
+“Oh I don’t care! Much good it does me!”
+
+Mrs. Jordan after an instant recovered her superiority. “No—it doesn’t
+lead to much.” Her own initiations so clearly did. Still—after all; and
+she was not jealous: “There must be a charm.”
+
+“In seeing them?” At this the girl suddenly let herself go. “I hate
+them. There’s that charm!”
+
+Mrs. Jordan gaped again. “The _real_ ‘smarts’?”
+
+“Is that what you call Mrs. Bubb? Yes—it comes to me; I’ve had Mrs.
+Bubb. I don’t think she has been in herself, but there are things her
+maid has brought. Well, my dear!”—and the young person from Cocker’s,
+recalling these things and summing them up, seemed suddenly to have
+much to say. She didn’t say it, however; she checked it; she only
+brought out: “Her maid, who’s horrid—_she_ must have her!” Then she
+went on with indifference: “They’re _too_ real! They’re selfish
+brutes.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan, turning it over, adopted at last the plan of treating it
+with a smile. She wished to be liberal. “Well, of course, they do lay
+it out.”
+
+“They bore me to death,” her companion pursued with slightly more
+temperance.
+
+But this was going too far. “Ah that’s because you’ve no sympathy!”
+
+The girl gave an ironic laugh, only retorting that nobody could have
+any who had to count all day all the words in the dictionary; a
+contention Mrs. Jordan quite granted, the more that she shuddered at
+the notion of ever failing of the very gift to which she owed the
+vogue—the rage she might call it—that had caught her up. Without
+sympathy—or without imagination, for it came back again to that—how
+should she get, for big dinners, down the middle and toward the far
+corners at all? It wasn’t the combinations, which were easily managed:
+the strain was over the ineffable simplicities, those that the
+bachelors above all, and Lord Rye perhaps most of any, threw off—just
+blew off like cigarette-puffs—such sketches of. The betrothed of Mr.
+Mudge at all events accepted the explanation, which had the effect, as
+almost any turn of their talk was now apt to have, of bringing her
+round to the terrific question of that gentleman. She was tormented
+with the desire to get out of Mrs. Jordan, on this subject, what she
+was sure was at the back of Mrs. Jordan’s head; and to get it out of
+her, queerly enough, if only to vent a certain irritation at it. She
+knew that what her friend would already have risked if she hadn’t been
+timid and tortuous was: “Give him up—yes, give him up: you’ll see that
+with your sure chances you’ll be able to do much better.”
+
+Our young woman had a sense that if that view could only be put before
+her with a particular sniff for poor Mr. Mudge she should hate it as
+much as she morally ought. She was conscious of not, as yet, hating it
+quite so much as that. But she saw that Mrs. Jordan was conscious of
+something too, and that there was a degree of confidence she was
+waiting little by little to arrive at. The day came when the girl
+caught a glimpse of what was still wanting to make her friend feel
+strong; which was nothing less than the prospect of being able to
+announce the climax of sundry private dreams. The associate of the
+aristocracy had personal calculations—matter for brooding and dreaming,
+even for peeping out not quite hopelessly from behind the
+window-curtains of lonely lodgings. If she did the flowers for the
+bachelors, in short, didn’t she expect that to have consequences very
+different from such an outlook at Cocker’s as she had pronounced wholly
+desperate? There seemed in very truth something auspicious in the
+mixture of bachelors and flowers, though, when looked hard in the eye,
+Mrs. Jordan was not quite prepared to say she had expected a positive
+proposal from Lord Rye to pop out of it. Our young woman arrived at
+last, none the less, at a definite vision of what was in her mind. This
+was a vivid foreknowledge that the betrothed of Mr. Mudge would, unless
+conciliated in advance by a successful rescue, almost hate her on the
+day she should break a particular piece of news. How could that
+unfortunate otherwise endure to hear of what, under the protection of
+Lady Ventnor, was after all so possible.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+Meanwhile, since irritation sometimes relieved her, the betrothed of
+Mr. Mudge found herself indebted to that admirer for amounts of it
+perfectly proportioned to her fidelity. She always walked with him on
+Sundays, usually in the Regent’s Park, and quite often, once or twice a
+month he took her, in the Strand or thereabouts, to see a piece that
+was having a run. The productions he always preferred were the really
+good ones—Shakespeare, Thompson or some funny American thing; which, as
+it also happened that she hated vulgar plays, gave him ground for what
+was almost the fondest of his approaches, the theory that their tastes
+were, blissfully, just the same. He was for ever reminding her of that,
+rejoicing over it and being affectionate and wise about it. There were
+times when she wondered how in the world she could “put up with” him,
+how she could put up with any man so smugly unconscious of the
+immensity of her difference. It was just for this difference that, if
+she was to be liked at all, she wanted to be liked, and if that was not
+the source of Mr. Mudge’s admiration, she asked herself what on earth
+_could_ be? She was not different only at one point, she was different
+all round; unless perhaps indeed in being practically human, which her
+mind just barely recognised that he also was. She would have made
+tremendous concessions in other quarters: there was no limit for
+instance to those she would have made to Captain Everard; but what I
+have named was the most she was prepared to do for Mr. Mudge. It was
+because _he_ was different that, in the oddest way, she liked as well
+as deplored him; which was after all a proof that the disparity, should
+they frankly recognise it, wouldn’t necessarily be fatal. She felt
+that, oleaginous—too oleaginous—as he was, he was somehow comparatively
+primitive: she had once, during the portion of his time at Cocker’s
+that had overlapped her own, seen him collar a drunken soldier, a big
+violent man who, having come in with a mate to get a postal-order
+cashed, had made a grab at the money before his friend could reach it
+and had so determined, among the hams and cheeses and the lodgers from
+Thrupp’s, immediate and alarming reprisals, a scene of scandal and
+consternation. Mr. Buckton and the counter-clerk had crouched within
+the cage, but Mr. Mudge had, with a very quiet but very quick step
+round the counter, an air of masterful authority she shouldn’t soon
+forget, triumphantly interposed in the scrimmage, parted the combatants
+and shaken the delinquent in his skin. She had been proud of him at
+that moment, and had felt that if their affair had not already been
+settled the neatness of his execution would have left her without
+resistance.
+
+Their affair had been settled by other things: by the evident sincerity
+of his passion and by the sense that his high white apron resembled a
+front of many floors. It had gone a great way with her that he would
+build up a business to his chin, which he carried quite in the air.
+This could only be a question of time; he would have all Piccadilly in
+the pen behind his ear. That was a merit in itself for a girl who had
+known what she had known. There were hours at which she even found him
+good-looking, though, frankly there could be no crown for her effort to
+imagine on the part of the tailor or the barber some such treatment of
+his appearance as would make him resemble even remotely a man of the
+world. His very beauty was the beauty of a grocer, and the finest
+future would offer it none too much room consistently to develop. She
+had engaged herself in short to the perfection of a type, and almost
+anything square and smooth and whole had its weight for a person still
+conscious herself of being a mere bruised fragment of wreckage. But it
+contributed hugely at present to carry on the two parallel lines of her
+experience in the cage and her experience out of it. After keeping
+quiet for some time about this opposition she suddenly—one Sunday
+afternoon on a penny chair in the Regent’s Park—broke, for him,
+capriciously, bewilderingly, into an intimation of what it came to. He
+had naturally pressed more and more on the point of her again placing
+herself where he could see her hourly, and for her to recognise that
+she had as yet given him no sane reason for delay he had small need to
+describe himself as unable to make out what she was up to. As if, with
+her absurd bad reasons, she could have begun to tell him! Sometimes she
+thought it would be amusing to let him have them full in the face, for
+she felt she should die of him unless she once in a while stupefied
+him; and sometimes she thought it would be disgusting and perhaps even
+fatal. She liked him, however, to think her silly, for that gave her
+the margin which at the best she would always require; and the only
+difficulty about this was that he hadn’t enough imagination to oblige
+her. It produced none the less something of the desired effect—to leave
+him simply wondering why, over the matter of their reunion, she didn’t
+yield to his arguments. Then at last, simply as if by accident and out
+of mere boredom on a day that was rather flat, she preposterously
+produced her own. “Well, wait a bit. Where I am I still see things.”
+And she talked to him even worse, if possible, than she had talked to
+Jordan.
+
+Little by little, to her own stupefaction, she caught that he was
+trying to take it as she meant it and that he was neither astonished
+nor angry. Oh the British tradesman—this gave her an idea of his
+resources! Mr. Mudge would be angry only with a person who, like the
+drunken soldier in the shop, should have an unfavourable effect on
+business. He seemed positively to enter, for the time and without the
+faintest flash of irony or ripple of laughter, into the whimsical
+grounds of her enjoyment of Cocker’s custom, and instantly to be
+casting up whatever it might, as Mrs. Jordan had said, lead to. What he
+had in mind was not of course what Mrs. Jordan had had: it was
+obviously not a source of speculation with him that his sweetheart
+might pick up a husband. She could see perfectly that this was not for
+a moment even what he supposed she herself dreamed of. What she had
+done was simply to give his sensibility another push into the dim vast
+of trade. In that direction it was all alert, and she had whisked
+before it the mild fragrance of a “connexion.” That was the most he
+could see in any account of her keeping in, on whatever roundabout
+lines, with the gentry; and when, getting to the bottom of this, she
+quickly proceeded to show him the kind of eye she turned on such people
+and to give him a sketch of what that eye discovered, she reduced him
+to the particular prostration in which he could still be amusing to
+her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+“They’re the most awful wretches, I assure you—the lot all about
+there.”
+
+“Then why do you want to stay among them?”
+
+“My dear man, just because they _are_. It makes me hate them so.”
+
+“Hate them? I thought you liked them.”
+
+“Don’t be stupid. What I ‘like’ is just to loathe them. You wouldn’t
+believe what passes before my eyes.”
+
+“Then why have you never told me? You didn’t mention anything before I
+left.”
+
+“Oh I hadn’t got round to it then. It’s the sort of thing you don’t
+believe at first; you have to look round you a bit and then you
+understand. You work into it more and more. Besides,” the girl went on,
+“this is the time of the year when the worst lot come up. They’re
+simply packed together in those smart streets. Talk of the numbers of
+the poor! What _I_ can vouch for is the numbers of the rich! There are
+new ones every day, and they seem to get richer and richer. Oh, they do
+come up!” she cried, imitating for her private recreation—she was sure
+it wouldn’t reach Mr. Mudge—the low intonation of the counter-clerk.
+
+“And where do they come from?” her companion candidly enquired.
+
+She had to think a moment; then she found something. “From the ‘spring
+meetings.’ They bet tremendously.”
+
+“Well, they bet enough at Chalk Farm, if that’s all.”
+
+“It _isn’t_ all. It isn’t a millionth part!” she replied with some
+sharpness. “It’s immense fun”—she would tantalise him. Then as she had
+heard Mrs. Jordan say, and as the ladies at Cocker’s even sometimes
+wired, “It’s quite too dreadful!” She could fully feel how it was Mr.
+Mudge’s propriety, which was extreme—he had a horror of coarseness and
+attended a Wesleyan chapel—that prevented his asking for details. But
+she gave him some of the more innocuous in spite of himself, especially
+putting before him how, at Simpkin’s and Ladle’s, they all made the
+money fly. That was indeed what he liked to hear: the connexion was not
+direct, but one was somehow more in the right place where the money was
+flying than where it was simply and meagrely nesting. The air felt that
+stir, he had to acknowledge, much less at Chalk Farm than in the
+district in which his beloved so oddly enjoyed her footing. She gave
+him, she could see, a restless sense that these might be familiarities
+not to be sacrificed; germs, possibilities, faint foreshowings—heaven
+knew what—of the initiation it would prove profitable to have arrived
+at when in the fulness of time he should have his own shop in some such
+paradise. What really touched him—that was discernible—was that she
+could feed him with so much mere vividness of reminder, keep before
+him, as by the play of a fan, the very wind of the swift bank-notes and
+the charm of the existence of a class that Providence had raised up to
+be the blessing of grocers. He liked to think that the class was there,
+that it was always there, and that she contributed in her slight but
+appreciable degree to keep it up to the mark. He couldn’t have
+formulated his theory of the matter, but the exuberance of the
+aristocracy was the advantage of trade, and everything was knit
+together in a richness of pattern that it was good to follow with one’s
+finger-tips. It was a comfort to him to be thus assured that there were
+no symptoms of a drop. What did the sounder, as she called it, nimbly
+worked, do but keep the ball going?
+
+What it came to therefore for Mr. Mudge was that all enjoyments were,
+as might be said, inter-related, and that the more people had the more
+they wanted to have. The more flirtations, as he might roughly express
+it, the more cheese and pickles. He had even in his own small way been
+dimly struck with the linkèd sweetness connecting the tender passion
+with cheap champagne, or perhaps the other way round. What he would
+have liked to say had he been able to work out his thought to the end
+was: “I see, I see. Lash them up then, lead them on, keep them going:
+some of it can’t help, some time, coming _our_ way.” Yet he was
+troubled by the suspicion of subtleties on his companion’s part that
+spoiled the straight view. He couldn’t understand people’s hating what
+they liked or liking what they hated; above all it hurt him
+somewhere—for he had his private delicacies—to see anything _but_ money
+made out of his betters. To be too enquiring, or in any other way too
+free, at the expense of the gentry was vaguely wrong; the only thing
+that was distinctly right was to be prosperous at any price. Wasn’t it
+just because they were up there aloft that they were lucrative? He
+concluded at any rate by saying to his young friend: “If it’s improper
+for you to remain at Cocker’s, then that falls in exactly with the
+other reasons I’ve put before you for your removal.”
+
+“Improper?”—her smile became a prolonged boldness. “My dear boy,
+there’s no one like you!”
+
+“I dare say,” he laughed; “but that doesn’t help the question.”
+
+“Well,” she returned, “I can’t give up my friends. I’m making even more
+than Mrs. Jordan.”
+
+Mr. Mudge considered. “How much is _she_ making?”
+
+“Oh you dear donkey!”—and, regardless of all the Regent’s Park, she
+patted his cheek. This was the sort of moment at which she was
+absolutely tempted to tell him that she liked to be near Park Chambers.
+There was a fascination in the idea of seeing if, on a mention of
+Captain Everard, he wouldn’t do what she thought he might; wouldn’t
+weigh against the obvious objection the still more obvious advantage.
+The advantage of course could only strike him at the best as rather
+fantastic; but it was always to the good to keep hold when you _had_
+hold, and such an attitude would also after all involve a high tribute
+to her fidelity. Of one thing she absolutely never doubted: Mr. Mudge
+believed in her with a belief—! She believed in herself too, for that
+matter: if there was a thing in the world no one could charge her with
+it was being the kind of low barmaid person who rinsed tumblers and
+bandied slang. But she forbore as yet to speak; she had not spoken even
+to Mrs. Jordan; and the hush that on her lips surrounded the Captain’s
+name maintained itself as a kind of symbol of the success that, up to
+this time, had attended something or other—she couldn’t have said
+what—that she humoured herself with calling, without words, her
+relation with him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+She would have admitted indeed that it consisted of little more than
+the fact that his absences, however frequent and however long, always
+ended with his turning up again. It was nobody’s business in the world
+but her own if that fact continued to be enough for her. It was of
+course not enough just in itself; what it had taken on to make it so
+was the extraordinary possession of the elements of his life that
+memory and attention had at last given her. There came a day when this
+possession on the girl’s part actually seemed to enjoy between them,
+while their eyes met, a tacit recognition that was half a joke and half
+a deep solemnity. He bade her good morning always now; he often quite
+raised his hat to her. He passed a remark when there was time or room,
+and once she went so far as to say to him that she hadn’t seen him for
+“ages.” “Ages” was the word she consciously and carefully, though a
+trifle tremulously used; “ages” was exactly what she meant. To this he
+replied in terms doubtless less anxiously selected, but perhaps on that
+account not the less remarkable, “Oh yes, hasn’t it been awfully wet?”
+That was a specimen of their give and take; it fed her fancy that no
+form of intercourse so transcendent and distilled had ever been
+established on earth. Everything, so far as they chose to consider it
+so, might mean almost anything. The want of margin in the cage, when he
+peeped through the bars, wholly ceased to be appreciable. It was a
+drawback only in superficial commerce. With Captain Everard she had
+simply the margin of the universe. It may be imagined therefore how
+their unuttered reference to all she knew about him could in this
+immensity play at its ease. Every time he handed in a telegram it was
+an addition to her knowledge: what did his constant smile mean to mark
+if it didn’t mean to mark that? He never came into the place without
+saying to her in this manner: “Oh yes, you have me by this time so
+completely at your mercy that it doesn’t in the least matter what I
+give you now. You’ve become a comfort, I assure you!”
+
+She had only two torments; the greatest of which was that she couldn’t,
+not even once or twice, touch with him on some individual fact. She
+would have given anything to have been able to allude to one of his
+friends by name, to one of his engagements by date, to one of his
+difficulties by the solution. She would have given almost as much for
+just the right chance—it would have to be tremendously right—to show
+him in some sharp sweet way that she had perfectly penetrated the
+greatest of these last and now lived with it in a kind of heroism of
+sympathy. He was in love with a woman to whom, and to any view of whom,
+a lady-telegraphist, and especially one who passed a life among hams
+and cheeses, was as the sand on the floor; and what her dreams desired
+was the possibility of its somehow coming to him that her own interest
+in him could take a pure and noble account of such an infatuation and
+even of such an impropriety. As yet, however, she could only rub along
+with the hope that an accident, sooner or later, might give her a lift
+toward popping out with something that would surprise and perhaps even,
+some fine day, assist him. What could people mean moreover—cheaply
+sarcastic people—by not feeling all that could be got out of the
+weather? _She_ felt it all, and seemed literally to feel it most when
+she went quite wrong, speaking of the stuffy days as cold, of the cold
+ones as stuffy, and betraying how little she knew, in her cage, of
+whether it was foul or fair. It was for that matter always stuffy at
+Cocker’s, and she finally settled down to the safe proposition that the
+outside element was “changeable.” Anything seemed true that made him so
+radiantly assent.
+
+This indeed is a small specimen of her cultivation of insidious ways of
+making things easy for him—ways to which of course she couldn’t be at
+all sure he did real justice. Real justice was not of this world: she
+had had too often to come back to that; yet, strangely, happiness was,
+and her traps had to be set for it in a manner to keep them unperceived
+by Mr. Buckton and the counter-clerk. The most she could hope for apart
+from the question, which constantly flickered up and died down, of the
+divine chance of his consciously liking her, would be that, without
+analysing it, he should arrive at a vague sense that Cocker’s was—well,
+attractive; easier, smoother, sociably brighter, slightly more
+picturesque, in short more propitious in general to his little affairs,
+than any other establishment just thereabouts. She was quite aware that
+they couldn’t be, in so huddled a hole, particularly quick; but she
+found her account in the slowness—she certainly could bear it if _he_
+could. The great pang was that just thereabouts post-offices were so
+awfully thick. She was always seeing him in imagination in other places
+and with other girls. But she would defy any other girl to follow him
+as she followed. And though they weren’t, for so many reasons, quick at
+Cocker’s, she could hurry for him when, through an intimation light as
+air, she gathered that he was pressed.
+
+When hurry was, better still, impossible, it was because of the
+pleasantest thing of all, the particular element of their contact—she
+would have called it their friendship—that consisted of an almost
+humorous treatment of the look of some of his words. They would never
+perhaps have grown half so intimate if he had not, by the blessing of
+heaven, formed some of his letters with a queerness—! It was positive
+that the queerness could scarce have been greater if he had practised
+it for the very purpose of bringing their heads together over it as far
+as was possible to heads on different sides of a wire fence. It had
+taken her truly but once or twice to master these tricks, but, at the
+cost of striking him perhaps as stupid, she could still challenge them
+when circumstances favoured. The great circumstance that favoured was
+that she sometimes actually believed he knew she only feigned
+perplexity. If he knew it therefore he tolerated it; if he tolerated it
+he came back; and if he came back he liked her. This was her seventh
+heaven; and she didn’t ask much of his liking—she only asked of it to
+reach the point of his not going away because of her own. He had at
+times to be away for weeks; he had to lead his life; he had to
+travel—there were places to which he was constantly wiring for “rooms”:
+all this she granted him, forgave him; in fact, in the long run,
+literally blessed and thanked him for. If he had to lead his life, that
+precisely fostered his leading it so much by telegraph: therefore the
+benediction was to come in when he could. That was all she asked—that
+he shouldn’t wholly deprive her.
+
+Sometimes she almost felt that he couldn’t have deprived her even had
+he been minded, by reason of the web of revelation that was woven
+between them. She quite thrilled herself with thinking what, with such
+a lot of material, a bad girl would do. It would be a scene better than
+many in her ha’penny novels, this going to him in the dusk of evening
+at Park Chambers and letting him at last have it. “I know too much
+about a certain person now not to put it to you—excuse my being so
+lurid—that it’s quite worth your while to buy me off. Come, therefore;
+buy me!” There was a point indeed at which such flights had to drop
+again—the point of an unreadiness to name, when it came to that, the
+purchasing medium. It wouldn’t certainly be anything so gross as money,
+and the matter accordingly remained rather vague, all the more that
+_she_ was not a bad girl. It wasn’t for any such reason as might have
+aggravated a mere minx that she often hoped he would again bring Cissy.
+The difficulty of this, however, was constantly present to her, for the
+kind of communion to which Cocker’s so richly ministered rested on the
+fact that Cissy and he were so often in different places. She knew by
+this time all the places—Suchbury, Monkhouse, Whiteroy, Finches—and
+even how the parties on these occasions were composed; but her subtlety
+found ways to make her knowledge fairly protect and promote their
+keeping, as she had heard Mrs. Jordan say, in touch. So, when he
+actually sometimes smiled as if he really felt the awkwardness of
+giving her again one of the same old addresses, all her being went out
+in the desire—which her face must have expressed—that he should
+recognise her forbearance to criticise as one of the finest tenderest
+sacrifices a woman had ever made for love.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+She was occasionally worried, however this might be, by the impression
+that these sacrifices, great as they were, were nothing to those that
+his own passion had imposed; if indeed it was not rather the passion of
+his confederate, which had caught him up and was whirling him round
+like a great steam-wheel. He was at any rate in the strong grip of a
+dizzy splendid fate; the wild wind of his life blew him straight before
+it. Didn’t she catch in his face at times, even through his smile and
+his happy habit, the gleam of that pale glare with which a bewildered
+victim appeals, as he passes, to some pair of pitying eyes? He perhaps
+didn’t even himself know how scared he was; but _she_ knew. They were
+in danger, they were in danger, Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen: it
+beat every novel in the shop. She thought of Mr. Mudge and his safe
+sentiment; she thought of herself and blushed even more for her tepid
+response to it. It was a comfort to her at such moments to feel that in
+another relation—a relation supplying that affinity with her nature
+that Mr. Mudge, deluded creature, would never supply—she should have
+been no more tepid than her ladyship. Her deepest soundings were on two
+or three occasions of finding herself almost sure that, if she dared,
+her ladyship’s lover would have gathered relief from “speaking” to her.
+She literally fancied once or twice that, projected as he was toward
+his doom, her own eyes struck him, while the air roared in his ears, as
+the one pitying pair in the crowd. But how could he speak to her while
+she sat sandwiched there between the counter-clerk and the sounder?
+
+She had long ago, in her comings and goings made acquaintance with Park
+Chambers and reflected as she looked up at their luxurious front that
+_they_, of course, would supply the ideal setting for the ideal speech.
+There was not an object in London that, before the season was over, was
+more stamped upon her brain. She went roundabout to pass it, for it was
+not on the short way; she passed on the opposite side of the street and
+always looked up, though it had taken her a long time to be sure of the
+particular set of windows. She had made that out finally by an act of
+audacity that at the time had almost stopped her heart-beats and that
+in retrospect greatly quickened her blushes. One evening she had
+lingered late and watched—watched for some moment when the porter, who
+was in uniform and often on the steps, had gone in with a visitor. Then
+she followed boldly, on the calculation that he would have taken the
+visitor up and that the hall would be free. The hall _was_ free, and
+the electric light played over the gilded and lettered board that
+showed the names and numbers of the occupants of the different floors.
+What she wanted looked straight at her—Captain Everard was on the
+third. It was as if, in the immense intimacy of this, they were, for
+the instant and the first time, face to face outside the cage. Alas!
+they were face to face but a second or two: she was whirled out on the
+wings of a panic fear that he might just then be entering or issuing.
+This fear was indeed, in her shameless deflexions, never very far from
+her, and was mixed in the oddest way with depressions and
+disappointments. It was dreadful, as she trembled by, to run the risk
+of looking to him as if she basely hung about; and yet it was dreadful
+to be obliged to pass only at such moments as put an encounter out of
+the question.
+
+At the horrible hour of her first coming to Cocker’s he was always—it
+was to be hoped—snug in bed; and at the hour of her final departure he
+was of course—she had such things all on her fingers’-ends—dressing for
+dinner. We may let it pass that if she couldn’t bring herself to hover
+till he was dressed, this was simply because such a process for such a
+person could only be terribly prolonged. When she went in the middle of
+the day to her own dinner she had too little time to do anything but go
+straight, though it must be added that for a real certainty she would
+joyously have omitted the repast. She had made up her mind as to there
+being on the whole no decent pretext to justify her flitting casually
+past at three o’clock in the morning. That was the hour at which, if
+the ha’penny novels were not all wrong, he probably came home for the
+night. She was therefore reduced to the vainest figuration of the
+miraculous meeting toward which a hundred impossibilities would have to
+conspire. But if nothing was more impossible than the fact, nothing was
+more intense than the vision. What may not, we can only moralise, take
+place in the quickened muffled perception of a young person with an
+ardent soul? All our humble friend’s native distinction, her refinement
+of personal grain, of heredity, of pride, took refuge in this small
+throbbing spot; for when she was most conscious of the objection of her
+vanity and the pitifulness of her little flutters and manoeuvres, then
+the consolation and the redemption were most sure to glow before her in
+some just discernible sign. He did like her!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+He never brought Cissy back, but Cissy came one day without him, as
+fresh as before from the hands of Marguerite, or only, at the season’s
+end, a trifle less fresh. She was, however, distinctly less serene. She
+had brought nothing with her and looked about with impatience for the
+forms and the place to write. The latter convenience, at Cocker’s, was
+obscure and barely adequate, and her clear voice had the light note of
+disgust which her lover’s never showed as she responded with a “There?”
+of surprise to the gesture made by the counter-clerk in answer to her
+sharp question. Our young friend was busy with half a dozen people, but
+she had dispatched them in her most businesslike manner by the time her
+ladyship flung through the bars this light of re-appearance. Then the
+directness with which the girl managed to receive the accompanying
+missive was the result of the concentration that had caused her to make
+the stamps fly during the few minutes occupied by the production of it.
+This concentration, in turn, may be described as the effect of the
+apprehension of imminent relief. It was nineteen days, counted and
+checked off, since she had seen the object of her homage; and as, had
+he been in London, she should, with his habits, have been sure to see
+him often, she was now about to learn what other spot his presence
+might just then happen to sanctify. For she thought of them, the other
+spots, as ecstatically conscious of it, expressively happy in it.
+
+But, gracious, how handsome _was_ her ladyship, and what an added price
+it gave him that the air of intimacy he threw out should have flowed
+originally from such a source! The girl looked straight through the
+cage at the eyes and lips that must so often have been so near as
+own—looked at them with a strange passion that for an instant had the
+result of filling out some of the gaps, supplying the missing answers,
+in his correspondence. Then as she made out that the features she thus
+scanned and associated were totally unaware of it, that they glowed
+only with the colour of quite other and not at all guessable thoughts,
+this directly added to their splendour, gave the girl the sharpest
+impression she had yet received of the uplifted, the unattainable
+plains of heaven, and yet at the same time caused her to thrill with a
+sense of the high company she did somehow keep. She was with the absent
+through her ladyship and with her ladyship through the absent. The only
+pang—but it didn’t matter—was the proof in the admirable face, in the
+sightless preoccupation of its possessor, that the latter hadn’t a
+notion of her. Her folly had gone to the point of half believing that
+the other party to the affair must sometimes mention in Eaton Square
+the extraordinary little person at the place from which he so often
+wired. Yet the perception of her visitor’s blankness actually helped
+this extraordinary little person, the next instant, to take refuge in a
+reflexion that could be as proud as it liked. “How little she knows,
+how little she knows!” the girl cried to herself; for what did that
+show after all but that Captain Everard’s telegraphic confidant was
+Captain Everard’s charming secret? Our young friend’s perusal of her
+ladyship’s telegram was literally prolonged by a momentary daze: what
+swam between her and the words, making her see them as through rippled
+shallow sunshot water, was the great, the perpetual flood of “How much
+_I_ know—how much _I_ know!” This produced a delay in her catching
+that, on the face, these words didn’t give her what she wanted, though
+she was prompt enough with her remembrance that her grasp was, half the
+time, just of what was _not_ on the face. “Miss Dolman, Parade Lodge,
+Parade Terrace, Dover. Let him instantly know right one, Hôtel de
+France, Ostend. Make it seven nine four nine six one. Wire me
+alternative Burfield’s.”
+
+The girl slowly counted. Then he was at Ostend. This hooked on with so
+sharp a click that, not to feel she was as quickly letting it all slip
+from her, she had absolutely to hold it a minute longer and to do
+something to that end. Thus it was that she did on this occasion what
+she never did—threw off a “Reply paid?” that sounded officious, but
+that she partly made up for by deliberately affixing the stamps and by
+waiting till she had done so to give change. She had, for so much
+coolness, the strength that she considered she knew all about Miss
+Dolman.
+
+“Yes—paid.” She saw all sorts of things in this reply, even to a small
+suppressed start of surprise at so correct an assumption; even to an
+attempt the next minute at a fresh air of detachment. “How much, with
+the answer?” The calculation was not abstruse, but our intense observer
+required a moment more to make it, and this gave her ladyship time for
+a second thought. “Oh just wait!” The white begemmed hand bared to
+write rose in sudden nervousness to the side of the wonderful face
+which, with eyes of anxiety for the paper on the counter, she brought
+closer to the bars of the cage. “I think I must alter a word!” On this
+she recovered her telegram and looked over it again; but she had a new,
+an obvious trouble, and studied it without deciding and with much of
+the effect of making our young woman watch her.
+
+This personage, meanwhile, at the sight of her expression, had decided
+on the spot. If she had always been sure they were in danger her
+ladyship’s expression was the best possible sign of it. There was a
+word wrong, but she had lost the right one, and much clearly depended
+on her finding it again. The girl, therefore, sufficiently estimating
+the affluence of customers and the distraction of Mr. Buckton and the
+counter-clerk, took the jump and gave it. “Isn’t it Cooper’s?”
+
+It was as if she had bodily leaped—cleared the top of the cage and
+alighted on her interlocutress. “Cooper’s?”—the stare was heightened by
+a blush. Yes, she had made Juno blush.
+
+This was all the greater reason for going on. “I mean instead of
+Burfield’s.”
+
+Our young friend fairly pitied her; she had made her in an instant so
+helpless, and yet not a bit haughty nor outraged. She was only
+mystified and scared. “Oh, you know—?”
+
+“Yes, I know!” Our young friend smiled, meeting the other’s eyes, and,
+having made Juno blush, proceeded to patronise her. “_I’ll_ do it”—she
+put out a competent hand. Her ladyship only submitted, confused and
+bewildered, all presence of mind quite gone; and the next moment the
+telegram was in the cage again and its author out of the shop. Then
+quickly, boldly, under all the eyes that might have witnessed her
+tampering, the extraordinary little person at Cocker’s made the proper
+change. People were really too giddy, and if they _were_, in a certain
+case, to be caught, it shouldn’t be the fault of her own grand memory.
+Hadn’t it been settled weeks before?—for Miss Dolman it was always to
+be “Cooper’s.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+But the summer “holidays” brought a marked difference; they were
+holidays for almost every one but the animals in the cage. The August
+days were flat and dry, and, with so little to feed it, she was
+conscious of the ebb of her interest in the secrets of the refined. She
+was in a position to follow the refined to the extent of knowing—they
+had made so many of their arrangements with her aid—exactly where they
+were; yet she felt quite as if the panorama had ceased unrolling and
+the band stopped playing. A stray member of the latter occasionally
+turned up, but the communications that passed before her bore now
+largely on rooms at hotels, prices of furnished houses, hours of
+trains, dates of sailings and arrangements for being “met”; she found
+them for the most part prosaic and coarse. The only thing was that they
+brought into her stuffy corner as straight a whiff of Alpine meadows
+and Scotch moors as she might hope ever to inhale; there were moreover
+in especial fat hot dull ladies who had out with her, to exasperation,
+the terms for seaside lodgings, which struck her as huge, and the
+matter of the number of beds required, which was not less portentous:
+this in reference to places of which the names—Eastbourne, Folkestone,
+Cromer, Scarborough, Whitby—tormented her with something of the sound
+of the plash of water that haunts the traveller in the desert. She had
+not been out of London for a dozen years, and the only thing to give a
+taste to the present dead weeks was the spice of a chronic resentment.
+The sparse customers, the people she did see, were the people who were
+“just off”—off on the decks of fluttered yachts, off to the uttermost
+point of rocky headlands where the very breeze was then playing for the
+want of which she said to herself that she sickened.
+
+There was accordingly a sense in which, at such a period, the great
+differences of the human condition could press upon her more than ever;
+a circumstance drawing fresh force in truth from the very fact of the
+chance that at last, for a change, did squarely meet her—the chance to
+be “off,” for a bit, almost as far as anybody. They took their turns in
+the cage as they took them both in the shop and at Chalk Farm; she had
+known these two months that time was to be allowed in September—no less
+than eleven days—for her personal private holiday. Much of her recent
+intercourse with Mr. Mudge had consisted of the hopes and fears,
+expressed mainly by himself, involved in the question of their getting
+the same dates—a question that, in proportion as the delight seemed
+assured, spread into a sea of speculation over the choice of where and
+how. All through July, on the Sunday evenings and at such other odd
+times as he could seize, he had flooded their talk with wild waves of
+calculation. It was practically settled that, with her mother,
+somewhere “on the south coast” (a phrase of which she liked the sound)
+they should put in their allowance together; but she already felt the
+prospect quite weary and worn with the way he went round and round on
+it. It had become his sole topic, the theme alike of his most solemn
+prudences and most placid jests, to which every opening led for return
+and revision and in which every little flower of a foretaste was pulled
+up as soon as planted. He had announced at the earliest
+day—characterising the whole business, from that moment, as their
+“plans,” under which name he handled it as a Syndicate handles a
+Chinese or other Loan—he had promptly declared that the question must
+be thoroughly studied, and he produced, on the whole subject, from day
+to day, an amount of information that excited her wonder and even, not
+a little, as she frankly let him know, her disdain. When she thought of
+the danger in which another pair of lovers rapturously lived she
+enquired of him anew why he could leave nothing to chance. Then she got
+for answer that this profundity was just his pride, and he pitted
+Ramsgate against Bournemouth and even Boulogne against Jersey—for he
+had great ideas—with all the mastery of detail that was some day,
+professionally, to carry him afar.
+
+The longer the time since she had seen Captain Everard the more she was
+booked, as she called it, to pass Park Chambers; and this was the sole
+amusement that in the lingering August days and the twilights sadly
+drawn out it was left her to cultivate. She had long since learned to
+know it for a feeble one, though its feebleness was perhaps scarce the
+reason for her saying to herself each evening as her time for departure
+approached: “No, no—not to-night.” She never failed of that silent
+remark, any more than she failed of feeling, in some deeper place than
+she had even yet fully sounded, that one’s remarks were as weak as
+straws and that, however one might indulge in them at eight o’clock,
+one’s fate infallibly declared itself in absolute indifference to them
+at about eight-fifteen. Remarks were remarks, and very well for that;
+but fate was fate, and this young lady’s was to pass Park Chambers
+every night in the working week. Out of the immensity of her knowledge
+of the life of the world there bloomed on these occasions as specific
+remembrance that it was regarded in that region, in August and
+September, as rather pleasant just to be caught for something or other
+in passing through town. Somebody was always passing and somebody might
+catch somebody else. It was in full cognisance of this subtle law that
+she adhered to the most ridiculous circuit she could have made to get
+home. One warm dull featureless Friday, when an accident had made her
+start from Cocker’s a little later than usual, she became aware that
+something of which the infinite possibilities had for so long peopled
+her dreams was at last prodigiously upon her, though the perfection in
+which the conditions happened to present it was almost rich enough to
+be but the positive creation of a dream. She saw, straight before her,
+like a vista painted in a picture, the empty street and the lamps that
+burned pale in the dusk not yet established. It was into the
+convenience of this quiet twilight that a gentleman on the doorstep of
+the Chambers gazed with a vagueness that our young lady’s little figure
+violently trembled, in the approach, with the measure of its power to
+dissipate. Everything indeed grew in a flash terrific and distinct; her
+old uncertainties fell away from her, and, since she was so familiar
+with fate, she felt as if the very nail that fixed it were driven in by
+the hard look with which, for a moment, Captain Everard awaited her.
+
+The vestibule was open behind him and the porter as absent as on the
+day she had peeped in; he had just come out—was in town, in a tweed
+suit and a pot hat, but between two journeys—duly bored over his
+evening and at a loss what to do with it. Then it was that she was glad
+she had never met him in that way before: she reaped with such ecstasy
+the benefit of his not being able to think she passed often. She jumped
+in two seconds to the determination that he should even suppose it to
+be the very first time and the very oddest chance: this was while she
+still wondered if he would identify or notice her. His original
+attention had not, she instinctively knew, been for the young woman at
+Cocker’s; it had only been for any young woman who might advance to the
+tune of her not troubling the quiet air, and in fact the poetic hour,
+with ugliness. Ah but then, and just as she had reached the door, came
+his second observation, a long light reach with which, visibly and
+quite amusedly, he recalled and placed her. They were on different
+sides, but the street, narrow and still, had only made more of a stage
+for the small momentary drama. It was not over, besides, it was far
+from over, even on his sending across the way, with the pleasantest
+laugh she had ever heard, a little lift of his hat and an “Oh good
+evening!” It was still less over on their meeting, the next minute,
+though rather indirectly and awkwardly, in the middle, of the road—a
+situation to which three or four steps of her own had unmistakeably
+contributed—and then passing not again to the side on which she had
+arrived, but back toward the portal of Park Chambers.
+
+“I didn’t know you at first. Are you taking a walk?”
+
+“Ah I don’t take walks at night! I’m going home after my work.”
+
+“Oh!”
+
+That was practically what they had meanwhile smiled out, and his
+exclamation to which for a minute he appeared to have nothing to add,
+left them face to face and in just such an attitude as, for his part,
+he might have worn had he been wondering if he could properly ask her
+to come in. During this interval in fact she really felt his question
+to be just “_How_ properly—?” It was simply a question of the degree of
+properness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+She never knew afterwards quite what she had done to settle it, and at
+the time she only knew that they presently moved, with vagueness, yet
+with continuity, away from the picture of the lighted vestibule and the
+quiet stairs and well up the street together. This also must have been
+in the absence of a definite permission, of anything vulgarly
+articulate, for that matter, on the part of either; and it was to be,
+later on, a thing of remembrance and reflexion for her that the limit
+of what just here for a longish minute passed between them was his
+taking in her thoroughly successful deprecation, though conveyed
+without pride or sound or touch, of the idea that she might be, out of
+the cage, the very shop-girl at large that she hugged the theory she
+wasn’t. Yes, it was strange, she afterwards thought, that so much could
+have come and gone and yet not disfigured the dear little intense
+crisis either with impertinence or with resentment, with any of the
+horrid notes of that kind of acquaintance. He had taken no liberty, as
+she would have so called it; and, through not having to betray the
+sense of one, she herself had, still more charmingly, taken none. On
+the spot, nevertheless, she could speculate as to what it meant that,
+if his relation with Lady Bradeen continued to be what her mind had
+built it up to, he should feel free to proceed with marked
+independence. This was one of the questions he was to leave her to deal
+with—the question whether people of his sort still asked girls up to
+their rooms when they were so awfully in love with other women. Could
+people of his sort do that without what people of _her_ sort would call
+being “false to their love”? She had already a vision of how the true
+answer was that people of her sort didn’t, in such cases, matter—didn’t
+count as infidelity, counted only as something else: she might have
+been curious, since it came to that, to see exactly what.
+
+Strolling together slowly in their summer twilight and their empty
+corner of Mayfair, they found themselves emerge at last opposite to one
+of the smaller gates of the Park; upon which, without any particular
+word about it—they were talking so of other things—they crossed the
+street and went in and sat down on a bench. She had gathered by this
+time one magnificent hope about him—the hope he would say nothing
+vulgar. She knew thoroughly what she meant by that; she meant something
+quite apart from any matter of his being “false.” Their bench was not
+far within; it was near the Park Lane paling and the patchy lamplight
+and the rumbling cabs and ‘buses. A strange emotion had come to her,
+and she felt indeed excitement within excitement; above all a conscious
+joy in testing him with chances he didn’t take. She had an intense
+desire he should know the type she really conformed to without her
+doing anything so low as tell him, and he had surely begun to know it
+from the moment he didn’t seize the opportunities into which a common
+man would promptly have blundered. These were on the mere awkward
+surface, and _their_ relation was beautiful behind and below them. She
+had questioned so little on the way what they might be doing that as
+soon as they were seated she took straight hold of it. Her hours, her
+confinement, the many conditions of service in the post-office,
+had—with a glance at his own postal resources and alternatives—formed,
+up to this stage, the subject of their talk. “Well, here we are, and it
+may be right enough; but this isn’t the least, you know, where I was
+going.”
+
+“You were going home?”
+
+“Yes, and I was already rather late. I was going to my supper.”
+
+“You haven’t had it?”
+
+“No indeed!”
+
+“Then you haven’t eaten—?”
+
+He looked of a sudden so extravagantly concerned that she laughed out.
+“All day? Yes, we do feed once. But that was long ago. So I must
+presently say good-bye.”
+
+“Oh deary _me_!” he exclaimed with an intonation so droll and yet a
+touch so light and a distress so marked—a confession of helplessness
+for such a case, in short, so unrelieved—that she at once felt sure she
+had made the great difference plain. He looked at her with the kindest
+eyes and still without saying what she had known he wouldn’t. She had
+known he wouldn’t say “Then sup with _me_!” but the proof of it made
+her feel as if she had feasted.
+
+“I’m not a bit hungry,” she went on.
+
+“Ah you _must_ be, awfully!” he made answer, but settling himself on
+the bench as if, after all, that needn’t interfere with his spending
+his evening. “I’ve always quite wanted the chance to thank you for the
+trouble you so often take for me.”
+
+“Yes, I know,” she replied; uttering the words with a sense of the
+situation far deeper than any pretence of not fitting his allusion. She
+immediately felt him surprised and even a little puzzled at her frank
+assent; but for herself the trouble she had taken could only, in these
+fleeting minutes—they would probably never come back—be all there like
+a little hoard of gold in her lap. Certainly he might look at it,
+handle it, take up the pieces. Yet if he understood anything he must
+understand all. “I consider you’ve already immensely thanked me.” The
+horror was back upon her of having seemed to hang about for some
+reward. “It’s awfully odd you should have been there just the one
+time—!”
+
+“The one time you’ve passed my place?”
+
+“Yes; you can fancy I haven’t many minutes to waste. There was a place
+to-night I had to stop at.”
+
+“I see, I see—” he knew already so much about her work. “It must be an
+awful grind—for a lady.”
+
+“It is, but I don’t think I groan over it any more than my
+companions—and you’ve seen _they’re_ not ladies!” She mildly jested,
+but with an intention. “One gets used to things, and there are
+employments I should have hated much more.” She had the finest
+conception of the beauty of not at least boring him. To whine, to count
+up her wrongs, was what a barmaid or a shop-girl would do, and it was
+quite enough to sit there like one of these.
+
+“If you had had another employment,” he remarked after a moment, “we
+might never have become acquainted.”
+
+“It’s highly probable—and certainly not in the same way.” Then, still
+with her heap of gold in her lap and something of the pride of it in
+her manner of holding her head, she continued not to move—she only
+smiled at him. The evening had thickened now; the scattered lamps were
+red; the Park, all before them, was full of obscure and ambiguous life;
+there were other couples on other benches whom it was impossible not to
+see, yet at whom it was impossible to look. “But I’ve walked so much
+out of my way with you only just to show you that—that”—with this she
+paused; it was not after all so easy to express—“that anything you may
+have thought is perfectly true.”
+
+“Oh I’ve thought a tremendous lot!” her companion laughed. “Do you mind
+my smoking?”
+
+“Why should I? You always smoke _there_.”
+
+“At your place? Oh yes, but here it’s different.”
+
+“No,” she said as he lighted a cigarette, “that’s just what it isn’t.
+It’s quite the same.”
+
+“Well, then, that’s because ‘there’ it’s so wonderful!”
+
+“Then you’re conscious of how wonderful it is?” she returned.
+
+He jerked his handsome head in literal protest at a doubt. “Why that’s
+exactly what I mean by my gratitude for all your trouble. It has been
+just as if you took a particular interest.” She only looked at him by
+way of answer in such sudden headlong embarrassment, as she was quite
+aware, that while she remained silent he showed himself checked by her
+expression. “You _have_—haven’t you?—taken a particular interest?”
+
+“Oh a particular interest!” she quavered out, feeling the whole
+thing—her headlong embarrassment—get terribly the better of her, and
+wishing, with a sudden scare, all the more to keep her emotion down.
+She maintained her fixed smile a moment and turned her eyes over the
+peopled darkness, unconfused now, because there was something much more
+confusing. This, with a fatal great rush, was simply the fact that they
+were thus together. They were near, near, and all she had imagined of
+that had only become more true, more dreadful and overwhelming. She
+stared straight away in silence till she felt she looked an idiot;
+then, to say something, to say nothing, she attempted a sound which
+ended in a flood of tears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+Her tears helped her really to dissimulate, for she had instantly, in
+so public a situation, to recover herself. They had come and gone in
+half a minute, and she immediately explained them. “It‘s only because
+I’m tired. It’s that—it’s that!” Then she added a trifle incoherently:
+“I shall never see you again.”
+
+“Ah but why not?” The mere tone in which her companion asked this
+satisfied her once for all as to the amount of imagination for which
+she could count on him. It was naturally not large: it had exhausted
+itself in having arrived at what he had already touched upon—the sense
+of an intention in her poor zeal at Cocker’s. But any deficiency of
+this kind was no fault in him: _he_ wasn’t obliged to have an inferior
+cleverness—to have second-rate resources and virtues. It had been as if
+he almost really believed she had simply cried for fatigue, and he
+accordingly put in some kind confused plea—“You ought really to take
+something: won’t you have something or other _somewhere_?” to which she
+had made no response but a headshake of a sharpness that settled it.
+“Why shan’t we all the more keep meeting?”
+
+“I mean meeting this way—only this way. At my place there—_that_ I’ve
+nothing to do with, and I hope of course you’ll turn up, with your
+correspondence, when it suits you. Whether I stay or not, I mean; for I
+shall probably not stay.”
+
+“You’re going somewhere else?” he put it with positive anxiety.
+
+“Yes, ever so far away—to the other end of London. There are all sorts
+of reasons I can’t tell you; and it’s practically settled. It’s better
+for me, much; and I’ve only kept on at Cocker’s for you.”
+
+“For me?”
+
+Making out in the dusk that he fairly blushed, she now measured how far
+he had been from knowing too much. Too much, she called it at present;
+and that was easy, since it proved so abundantly enough for her that he
+should simply be where he was. “As we shall never talk this way but
+to-night—never, never again!—here it all is. I’ll say it; I don’t care
+what you think; it doesn’t matter; I only want to help you. Besides,
+you’re kind—you’re kind. I’ve been thinking then of leaving for ever so
+long. But you’ve come so often—at times—and you’ve had so much to do,
+and it has been so pleasant and interesting, that I’ve remained, I’ve
+kept putting off any change. More than once, when I had nearly decided,
+you’ve turned up again and I’ve thought ‘Oh no!’ That’s the simple
+fact!” She had by this time got her confusion down so completely that
+she could laugh. “This is what I meant when I said to you just now that
+I ‘knew.’ I’ve known perfectly that you knew I took trouble for you;
+and that knowledge has been for me, and I seemed to see it was for you,
+as if there were something—I don’t know what to call it!—between us. I
+mean something unusual and good and awfully nice—something not a bit
+horrid or vulgar.”
+
+She had by this time, she could see, produced a great effect on him;
+but she would have spoken the truth to herself had she at the same
+moment declared that she didn’t in the least care: all the more that
+the effect must be one of extreme perplexity. What, in it all, was
+visibly clear for him, none the less, was that he was tremendously glad
+he had met her. She held him, and he was astonished at the force of it;
+he was intent, immensely considerate. His elbow was on the back of the
+seat, and his head, with the pot-hat pushed quite back, in a boyish
+way, so that she really saw almost for the first time his forehead and
+hair, rested on the hand into which he had crumpled his gloves. “Yes,”
+he assented, “it’s not a bit horrid or vulgar.”
+
+She just hung fire a moment, then she brought out the whole truth. “I’d
+do anything for you. I’d do anything for you.” Never in her life had
+she known anything so high and fine as this, just letting him have it
+and bravely and magnificently leaving it. Didn’t the place, the
+associations and circumstances, perfectly make it sound what it wasn’t?
+and wasn’t that exactly the beauty?
+
+So she bravely and magnificently left it, and little by little she felt
+him take it up, take it down, as if they had been on a satin sofa in a
+boudoir. She had never seen a boudoir, but there had been lots of
+boudoirs in the telegrams. What she had said at all events sank into
+him, so that after a minute he simply made a movement that had the
+result of placing his hand on her own—presently indeed that of her
+feeling herself firmly enough grasped. There was no pressure she need
+return, there was none she need decline; she just sat admirably still,
+satisfied for the time with the surprise and bewilderment of the
+impression she made on him. His agitation was even greater on the whole
+than she had at first allowed for. “I say, you know, you mustn’t think
+of leaving!” he at last broke out.
+
+“Of leaving Cocker’s, you mean?”
+
+“Yes, you must stay on there, whatever happens, and help a fellow.”
+
+She was silent a little, partly because it was so strange and exquisite
+to feel him watch her as if it really mattered to him and he were
+almost in suspense. “Then you _have_ quite recognised what I’ve tried
+to do?” she asked.
+
+“Why, wasn’t that exactly what I dashed over from my door just now to
+thank you for?”
+
+“Yes; so you said.”
+
+“And don’t you believe it?”
+
+She looked down a moment at his hand, which continued to cover her own;
+whereupon he presently drew it back, rather restlessly folding his
+arms. Without answering his question she went on: “Have you ever spoken
+of me?”
+
+“Spoken of you?”
+
+“Of my being there—of my knowing, and that sort of thing.”
+
+“Oh never to a human creature!” he eagerly declared.
+
+She had a small drop at this, which was expressed in another pause, and
+she then returned to what he had just asked her. “Oh yes, I quite
+believe you like it—my always being there and our taking things up so
+familiarly and successfully: if not exactly where we left them,” she
+laughed, “almost always at least at an interesting point!” He was about
+to say something in reply to this, but her friendly gaiety was quicker.
+“You want a great many things in life, a great many comforts and helps
+and luxuries—you want everything as pleasant as possible. Therefore, so
+far as it’s in the power of any particular person to contribute to all
+that—” She had turned her face to him smiling, just thinking.
+
+“Oh see here!” But he was highly amused. “Well, what then?” he enquired
+as if to humour her.
+
+“Why the particular person must never fail. We must manage it for you
+somehow.”
+
+He threw back his head, laughing out; he was really exhilarated. “Oh
+yes, somehow!”
+
+“Well, I think we each do—don’t we?—in one little way and another and
+according to our limited lights. I’m pleased at any rate, for myself,
+that you are; for I assure you I’ve done my best.”
+
+“You do better than any one!” He had struck a match for another
+cigarette, and the flame lighted an instant his responsive finished
+face, magnifying into a pleasant grimace the kindness with which he
+paid her this tribute. “You’re awfully clever, you know; cleverer,
+cleverer, cleverer—!” He had appeared on the point of making some
+tremendous statement; then suddenly, puffing his cigarette and shifting
+almost with violence on his seat, he let it altogether fall.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+In spite of this drop, if not just by reason of it, she felt as if Lady
+Bradeen, all but named out, had popped straight up; and she practically
+betrayed her consciousness by waiting a little before she rejoined:
+“Cleverer than who?”
+
+“Well, if I wasn’t afraid you’d think I swagger, I should say—than
+anybody! If you leave your place there, where shall you go?” he more
+gravely asked.
+
+“Oh too far for you ever to find me!”
+
+“I’d find you anywhere.”
+
+The tone of this was so still more serious that she had but her one
+acknowledgement. “I’d do anything for you—I’d do anything for you,” she
+repeated. She had already, she felt, said it all; so what did anything
+more, anything less, matter? That was the very reason indeed why she
+could, with a lighter note, ease him generously of any awkwardness
+produced by solemnity, either his own or hers. “Of course it must be
+nice for you to be able to think there are people all about who feel in
+such a way.”
+
+In immediate appreciation of this, however, he only smoked without
+looking at her. “But you don’t want to give up your present work?” he
+at last threw out. “I mean you _will_ stay in the post-office?”
+
+“Oh yes; I think I’ve a genius for that.”
+
+“Rather! No one can touch you.” With this he turned more to her again.
+“But you can get, with a move, greater advantages?”
+
+“I can get in the suburbs cheaper lodgings. I live with my mother. We
+need some space. There’s a particular place that has other
+inducements.”
+
+He just hesitated. “Where is it?”
+
+“Oh quite out of _your_ way. You’d never have time.”
+
+“But I tell you I’d go anywhere. Don’t you believe it?”
+
+“Yes, for once or twice. But you’d soon see it wouldn’t do for you.”
+
+He smoked and considered; seemed to stretch himself a little and, with
+his legs out, surrender himself comfortably. “Well, well, well—I
+believe everything you say. I take it from you—anything you like—in the
+most extraordinary way.” It struck her certainly—and almost without
+bitterness—that the way in which she was already, as if she had been an
+old friend, arranging for him and preparing the only magnificence she
+could muster, was quite the most extraordinary. “Don’t, _don’t_ go!” he
+presently went on. “I shall miss you too horribly!”
+
+“So that you just put it to me as a definite request?”—oh how she tried
+to divest this of all sound of the hardness of bargaining! That ought
+to have been easy enough, for what was she arranging to get? Before he
+could answer she had continued: “To be perfectly fair I should tell you
+I recognise at Cocker’s certain strong attractions. All you people
+come. I like all the horrors.”
+
+“The horrors?”
+
+“Those you all—you know the set I mean, _your_ set—show me with as good
+a conscience as if I had no more feeling than a letter-box.”
+
+He looked quite excited at the way she put it. “Oh they don’t know!”
+
+“Don’t know I’m not stupid? No, how should they?”
+
+“Yes, how should they?” said the Captain sympathetically. “But isn’t
+‘horrors’ rather strong?”
+
+“What you _do_ is rather strong!” the girl promptly returned.
+
+“What _I_ do?”
+
+“Your extravagance, your selfishness, your immorality, your crimes,”
+she pursued, without heeding his expression.
+
+“I _say_!”—her companion showed the queerest stare.
+
+“I like them, as I tell you—I revel in them. But we needn’t go into
+that,” she quietly went on; “for all I get out of it is the harmless
+pleasure of knowing. I know, I know, I know!”—she breathed it ever so
+gently.
+
+“Yes; that’s what has been between us,” he answered much more simply.
+
+She could enjoy his simplicity in silence, and for a moment she did so.
+“If I do stay because you want it—and I’m rather capable of that—there
+are two or three things I think you ought to remember. One is, you
+know, that I’m there sometimes for days and weeks together without your
+ever coming.”
+
+“Oh I’ll come every day!” he honestly cried.
+
+She was on the point, at this, of imitating with her hand his movement
+of shortly before; but she checked herself, and there was no want of
+effect in her soothing substitute. “How can you? How can you?” He had,
+too manifestly, only to look at it there, in the vulgarly animated
+gloom, to see that he couldn’t; and at this point, by the mere action
+of his silence, everything they had so definitely not named, the whole
+presence round which they had been circling, became part of their
+reference, settled in solidly between them. It was as if then for a
+minute they sat and saw it all in each other’s eyes, saw so much that
+there was no need of a pretext for sounding it at last. “Your danger,
+your danger—!” Her voice indeed trembled with it, and she could only
+for the moment again leave it so.
+
+During this moment he leaned back on the bench, meeting her in silence
+and with a face that grew more strange. It grew so strange that after a
+further instant she got straight up. She stood there as if their talk
+were now over, and he just sat and watched her. It was as if now—owing
+to the third person they had brought in—they must be more careful; so
+that the most he could finally say was: “That’s where it is!”
+
+“That’s where it is!” the girl as guardedly replied. He sat still, and
+she added: “I won’t give you up. Good-bye.”
+
+“Good-bye?”—he appealed, but without moving.
+
+“I don’t quite see my way, but I won’t give you up,” she repeated.
+“There. Good-bye.”
+
+It brought him with a jerk to his feet, tossing away his cigarette. His
+poor face was flushed. “See here—see here!”
+
+“No, I won’t; but I must leave you now,” she went on as if not hearing
+him.
+
+“See here—see here!” He tried, from the bench, to take her hand again.
+
+But that definitely settled it for her: this would, after all, be as
+bad as his asking her to supper. “You mustn’t come with me—no, no!”
+
+He sank back, quite blank, as if she had pushed him. “I mayn’t see you
+home?”
+
+“No, no; let me go.” He looked almost as if she had struck him, but she
+didn’t care; and the manner in which she spoke—it was literally as if
+she were angry—had the force of a command. “Stay where you are!”
+
+“See here—see here!” he nevertheless pleaded.
+
+“I won’t give you up!” she cried once more—this time quite with
+passion; on which she got away from him as fast as she could and left
+him staring after her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+Mr. Mudge had lately been so occupied with their famous “plans” that he
+had neglected for a while the question of her transfer; but down at
+Bournemouth, which had found itself selected as the field of their
+recreation by a process consisting, it seemed, exclusively of
+innumerable pages of the neatest arithmetic in a very greasy but most
+orderly little pocket-book, the distracting possible melted away—the
+fleeting absolute ruled the scene. The plans, hour by hour, were simply
+superseded, and it was much of a rest to the girl, as she sat on the
+pier and overlooked the sea and the company, to see them evaporate in
+rosy fumes and to feel that from moment to moment there was less left
+to cipher about. The week proves blissfully fine, and her mother, at
+their lodgings—partly to her embarrassment and partly to her
+relief—struck up with the landlady an alliance that left the younger
+couple a great deal of freedom. This relative took her pleasure of a
+week at Bournemouth in a stuffy back-kitchen and endless talks; to that
+degree even that Mr. Mudge himself—habitually inclined indeed to a
+scrutiny of all mysteries and to seeing, as he sometimes admitted, too
+much in things—made remarks on it as he sat on the cliff with his
+betrothed, or on the decks of steamers that conveyed them, close-packed
+items in terrific totals of enjoyment, to the Isle of Wight and the
+Dorset coast.
+
+He had a lodging in another house, where he had speedily learned the
+importance of keeping his eyes open, and he made no secret of his
+suspecting that sinister mutual connivances might spring, under the
+roof of his companions, from unnatural sociabilities. At the same time
+he fully recognised that as a source of anxiety, not to say of expense,
+his future mother-in law would have weighted them more by accompanying
+their steps than by giving her hostess, in the interest of the tendency
+they considered that they never mentioned, equivalent pledges as to the
+tea-caddy and the jam-pot. These were the questions—these indeed the
+familiar commodities—that he had now to put into the scales; and his
+betrothed had in consequence, during her holiday, the odd and yet
+pleasant and almost languid sense of an anticlimax. She had become
+conscious of an extraordinary collapse, a surrender to stillness and to
+retrospect. She cared neither to walk nor to sail; it was enough for
+her to sit on benches and wonder at the sea and taste the air and not
+be at Cocker’s and not see the counter-clerk. She still seemed to wait
+for something—something in the key of the immense discussions that had
+mapped out their little week of idleness on the scale of a world-atlas.
+Something came at last, but without perhaps appearing quite adequately
+to crown the monument.
+
+Preparation and precaution were, however, the natural flowers of Mr.
+Mudge’s mind, and in proportion as these things declined in one quarter
+they inevitably bloomed elsewhere. He could always, at the worst, have
+on Tuesday the project of their taking the Swanage boat on Thursday,
+and on Thursday that of their ordering minced kidneys on Saturday. He
+had moreover a constant gift of inexorable enquiry as to where and what
+they should have gone and have done if they hadn’t been exactly as they
+were. He had in short his resources, and his mistress had never been so
+conscious of them; on the other hand they never interfered so little
+with her own. She liked to be as she was—if it could only have lasted.
+She could accept even without bitterness a rigour of economy so great
+that the little fee they paid for admission to the pier had to be
+balanced against other delights. The people at Ladle’s and at Thrupp’s
+had _their_ ways of amusing themselves, whereas she had to sit and hear
+Mr. Mudge talk of what he might do if he didn’t take a bath, or of the
+bath he might take if he only hadn’t taken something else. He was
+always with her now, of course, always beside her; she saw him more
+than “hourly,” more than ever yet, more even than he had planned she
+should do at Chalk Farm. She preferred to sit at the far end, away from
+the band and the crowd; as to which she had frequent differences with
+her friend, who reminded her often that they could have only in the
+thick of it the sense of the money they were getting back. That had
+little effect on her, for she got back her money by seeing many things,
+the things of the past year, fall together and connect themselves,
+undergo the happy relegation that transforms melancholy and misery,
+passion and effort, into experience and knowledge.
+
+She liked having done with them, as she assured herself she had
+practically done, and the strange thing was that she neither missed the
+procession now nor wished to keep her place for it. It had become
+there, in the sun and the breeze and the sea-smell, a far-away story, a
+picture of another life. If Mr. Mudge himself liked processions, liked
+them at Bournemouth and on the pier quite as much as at Chalk Farm or
+anywhere, she learned after a little not to be worried by his perpetual
+counting of the figures that made them up. There were dreadful women in
+particular, usually fat and in men’s caps and write shoes, whom he
+could never let alone—not that _she_ cared; it was not the great world,
+the world of Cocker’s and Ladle’s and Thrupp’s, but it offered an
+endless field to his faculties of memory, philosophy, and frolic. She
+had never accepted him so much, never arranged so successfully for
+making him chatter while she carried on secret conversations. This
+separate commerce was with herself; and if they both practised a great
+thrift she had quite mastered that of merely spending words enough to
+keep him imperturbably and continuously going.
+
+He was charmed with the panorama, not knowing—or at any rate not at all
+showing that he knew—what far other images peopled her mind than the
+women in the navy caps and the shop-boys in the blazers. His
+observations on these types, his general interpretation of the show,
+brought home to her the prospect of Chalk Farm. She wondered sometimes
+that he should have derived so little illumination, during his period,
+from the society at Cocker’s. But one evening while their holiday
+cloudlessly waned he gave her such a proof of his quality as might have
+made her ashamed of her many suppressions. He brought out something
+that, in all his overflow, he had been able to keep back till other
+matters were disposed of. It was the announcement that he was at last
+ready to marry—that he saw his way. A rise at Chalk Farm had been
+offered him; he was to be taken into the business, bringing with him a
+capital the estimation of which by other parties constituted the
+handsomest recognition yet made of the head on his shoulders. Therefore
+their waiting was over—it could be a question of a near date. They
+would settle this date before going back, and he meanwhile had his eye
+on a sweet little home. He would take her to see it on their first
+Sunday.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+
+His having kept this great news for the last, having had such a card up
+his sleeve and not floated it out in the current of his chatter and the
+luxury of their leisure, was one of those incalculable strokes by which
+he could still affect her; the kind of thing that reminded her of the
+latent force that had ejected the drunken soldier—an example of the
+profundity of which his promotion was the proof. She listened a while
+in silence, on this occasion, to the wafted strains of the music; she
+took it in as she had not quite done before that her future was now
+constituted. Mr. Mudge was distinctly her fate; yet at this moment she
+turned her face quite away from him, showing him so long a mere quarter
+of her cheek that she at last again heard his voice. He couldn’t see a
+pair of tears that were partly the reason of her delay to give him the
+assurance he required; but he expressed at a venture the hope that she
+had had her fill of Cocker’s.
+
+She was finally able to turn back. “Oh quite. There’s nothing going on.
+No one comes but the Americans at Thrupp’s, and _they_ don’t do much.
+They don’t seem to have a secret in the world.”
+
+“Then the extraordinary reason you’ve been giving me for holding on
+there has ceased to work?”
+
+She thought a moment. “Yes, that one. I’ve seen the thing through—I’ve
+got them all in my pocket.”
+
+“So you’re ready to come?”
+
+For a little again she made no answer. “No, not yet, all the same. I’ve
+still got a reason—a different one.”
+
+He looked her all over as if it might have been something she kept in
+her mouth or her glove or under her jacket—something she was even
+sitting upon. “Well, I’ll have it, please.”
+
+“I went out the other night and sat in the Park with a gentleman,” she
+said at last.
+
+Nothing was ever seen like his confidence in her and she wondered a
+little now why it didn’t irritate her. It only gave her ease and space,
+as she felt, for telling him the whole truth that no one knew. It had
+arrived at present at her really wanting to do that, and yet to do it
+not in the least for Mr. Mudge, but altogether and only for herself.
+This truth filled out for her there the whole experience about to
+relinquish, suffused and coloured it as a picture that she should keep
+and that, describe it as she might, no one but herself would ever
+really see. Moreover she had no desire whatever to make Mr. Mudge
+jealous; there would be no amusement in it, for the amusement she had
+lately known had spoiled her for lower pleasures. There were even no
+materials for it. The odd thing was how she never doubted that,
+properly handled, his passion was poisonable; what had happened was
+that he had cannily selected a partner with no poison to distil. She
+read then and there that she should never interest herself in anybody
+as to whom some other sentiment, some superior view, wouldn’t be sure
+to interfere for him with jealousy. “And what did you get out of that?”
+he asked with a concern that was not in the least for his honour.
+
+“Nothing but a good chance to promise him I wouldn’t forsake him. He’s
+one of my customers.”
+
+“Then it’s for him not to forsake _you_.”
+
+“Well, he won’t. It’s all right. But I must just keep on as long as he
+may want me.”
+
+“Want you to sit with him in the Park?”
+
+“He may want me for that—but I shan’t. I rather liked it, but once,
+under the circumstances, is enough. I can do better for him in another
+manner.”
+
+“And what manner, pray?”
+
+“Well, elsewhere.”
+
+“Elsewhere?—I _say_!”
+
+This was an ejaculation used also by Captain Everard, but oh with what
+a different sound! “You needn’t ‘say’—there’s nothing to be said. And
+yet you ought perhaps to know.”
+
+“Certainly I ought. But _what_—up to now?”
+
+“Why exactly what I told him. That I’d do anything for him.”
+
+“What do you mean by ‘anything’?”
+
+“Everything.”
+
+Mr. Mudge’s immediate comment on this statement was to draw from his
+pocket a crumpled paper containing the remains of half a pound of
+“sundries.” These sundries had figured conspicuously in his prospective
+sketch of their tour, but it was only at the end of three days that
+they had defined themselves unmistakeably as chocolate-creams. “Have
+another?—_that_ one,” he said. She had another, but not the one he
+indicated, and then he continued: “What took place afterwards?”
+
+“Afterwards?”
+
+“What did you do when you had told him you’d do everything?”
+
+“I simply came away.”
+
+“Out of the Park?”
+
+“Yes, leaving him there. I didn’t let him follow me.”
+
+“Then what did you let him do?”
+
+“I didn’t let him do anything.”
+
+Mr. Mudge considered an instant. “Then what did you go there for?” His
+tone was even slightly critical.
+
+“I didn’t quite know at the time. It was simply to be with him, I
+suppose—just once. He’s in danger, and I wanted him to know I know it.
+It makes meeting him—at Cocker’s, since it’s that I want to stay on
+for—more interesting.”
+
+“It makes it mighty interesting for _me_!” Mr. Mudge freely declared.
+“Yet he didn’t follow you?” he asked. “_I_ would!”
+
+“Yes, of course. That was the way you began, you know. You’re awfully
+inferior to him.”
+
+“Well, my dear, you’re not inferior to anybody. You’ve got a cheek!
+What’s he in danger of?”
+
+“Of being found out. He’s in love with a lady—and it isn’t right—and
+_I’ve_ found him out.”
+
+“That’ll be a look-out for _me_!” Mr. Mudge joked. “You mean she has a
+husband?”
+
+“Never mind what she has! They’re in awful danger, but his is the
+worst, because he’s in danger from her too.”
+
+“Like me from you—the woman _I_ love? If he’s in the same funk as me—”
+
+“He’s in a worse one. He’s not only afraid of the lady—he’s afraid of
+other things.”
+
+Mr. Mudge selected another chocolate-cream. “Well, I’m only afraid of
+one! But how in the world can you help this party?”
+
+“I don’t know—perhaps not at all. But so long as there’s a chance—”
+
+“You won’t come away?”
+
+“No, you’ve got to wait for me.”
+
+Mr. Mudge enjoyed what was in his mouth. “And what will he give you?”
+
+“Give me?”
+
+“If you do help him.”
+
+“Nothing. Nothing in all the wide world.”
+
+“Then what will he give _me_?” Mr. Mudge enquired. “I mean for
+waiting.”
+
+The girl thought a moment; then she got up to walk. “He never heard of
+you,” she replied.
+
+“You haven’t mentioned me?”
+
+“We never mention anything. What I’ve told you is just what I’ve found
+out.”
+
+Mr. Mudge, who had remained on the bench, looked up at her; she often
+preferred to be quiet when he proposed to walk, but now that he seemed
+to wish to sit she had a desire to move. “But you haven’t told me what
+_he_ has found out.”
+
+She considered her lover. “He’d never find _you_, my dear!”
+
+Her lover, still on his seat, appealed to her in something of the
+attitude in which she had last left Captain Everard, but the impression
+was not the same. “Then where do I come in?”
+
+“You don’t come in at all. That’s just the beauty of it!”—and with this
+she turned to mingle with the multitude collected round the band. Mr.
+Mudge presently overtook her and drew her arm into his own with a quiet
+force that expressed the serenity of possession; in consonance with
+which it was only when they parted for the night at her door that he
+referred again to what she had told him.
+
+“Have you seen him since?”
+
+“Since the night in the Park? No, not once.”
+
+“Oh, what a cad!” said Mr. Mudge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+
+It was not till the end of October that she saw Captain Everard again,
+and on that occasion—the only one of all the series on which hindrance
+had been so utter—no communication with him proved possible. She had
+made out even from the cage that it was a charming golden day: a patch
+of hazy autumn sunlight lay across the sanded floor and also, higher
+up, quickened into brightness a row of ruddy bottled syrups. Work was
+slack and the place in general empty; the town, as they said in the
+cage, had not waked up, and the feeling of the day likened itself to
+something than in happier conditions she would have thought of
+romantically as Saint Martin’s summer. The counter-clerk had gone to
+his dinner; she herself was busy with arrears of postal jobs, in the
+midst of which she became aware that Captain Everard had apparently
+been in the shop a minute and that Mr. Buckton had already seized him.
+
+He had as usual half a dozen telegrams; and when he saw that she saw
+him and their eyes met he gave, on bowing to her, an exaggerated laugh
+in which she read a new consciousness. It was a confession of
+awkwardness; it seemed to tell her that of course he knew he ought
+better to have kept his head, ought to have been clever enough to wait,
+on some pretext, till he should have found her free. Mr. Buckton was a
+long time with him, and her attention was soon demanded by other
+visitors; so that nothing passed between them but the fulness of their
+silence. The look she took from him was his greeting, and the other one
+a simple sign of the eyes sent her before going out. The only token
+they exchanged therefore was his tacit assent to her wish that since
+they couldn’t attempt a certain frankness they should attempt nothing
+at all. This was her intense preference; she could be as still and cold
+as any one when that was the sole solution.
+
+Yet more than any contact hitherto achieved these counted instants
+struck her as marking a step: they were built so—just in the mere
+flash—on the recognition of his now definitely knowing what it was she
+would do for him. The “anything, anything” she had uttered in the Park
+went to and fro between them and under the poked-out china that
+interposed. It had all at last even put on the air of their not needing
+now clumsily to manoeuvre to converse: their former little postal
+make-believes, the intense implications of questions and answers and
+change, had become in the light of the personal fact, of their having
+had their moment, a possibility comparatively poor. It was as if they
+had met for all time—it exerted on their being in presence again an
+influence so prodigious. When she watched herself, in the memory of
+that night, walk away from him as if she were making an end, she found
+something too pitiful in the primness of such a gait. Hadn’t she
+precisely established on the part of each a consciousness that could
+end only with death?
+
+It must be admitted that in spite of this brave margin an irritation,
+after he had gone, remained with her; a sense that presently became one
+with a still sharper hatred of Mr. Buckton, who, on her friend’s
+withdrawal, had retired with the telegrams to the sounder and left her
+the other work. She knew indeed she should have a chance to see them,
+when she would, on file; and she was divided, as the day went on,
+between the two impressions of all that was lost and all that was
+re-asserted. What beset her above all, and as she had almost never
+known it before, was the desire to bound straight out, to overtake the
+autumn afternoon before it passed away for ever and hurry off to the
+Park and perhaps be with him there again on a bench. It became for an
+hour a fantastic vision with her that he might just have gone to sit
+and wait for her. She could almost hear him, through the tick of the
+sounder, scatter with his stick, in his impatience, the fallen leaves
+of October. Why should such a vision seize her at this particular
+moment with such a shake? There was a time—from four to five—when she
+could have cried with happiness and rage.
+
+Business quickened, it seemed, toward five, as if the town did wake up;
+she had therefore more to do, and she went through it with little sharp
+stampings and jerkings: she made the crisp postal-orders fairly snap
+while she breathed to herself “It’s the last day—the last day!” The
+last day of what? She couldn’t have told. All she knew now was that if
+she _were_ out of the cage she wouldn’t in the least have minded, this
+time, its not yet being dark. She would have gone straight toward Park
+Chambers and have hung about there till no matter when. She would have
+waited, stayed, rung, asked, have gone in, sat on the stairs. What the
+day was the last of was probably, to her strained inner sense, the
+group of golden ones, of any occasion for seeing the hazy sunshine
+slant at that angle into the smelly shop, of any range of chances for
+his wishing still to repeat to her the two words she had in the Park
+scarcely let him bring out. “See here—see here!”—the sound of these two
+words had been with her perpetually; but it was in her ears to-day
+without mercy, with a loudness that grew and grew. What was it they
+then expressed? what was it he had wanted her to see? She seemed,
+whatever it was, perfectly to see it now—to see that if she should just
+chuck the whole thing, should have a great and beautiful courage, he
+would somehow make everything up to her. When the clock struck five she
+was on the very point of saying to Mr. Buckton that she was deadly ill
+and rapidly getting worse. This announcement was on her lips, and she
+had quite composed the pale hard face she would offer him: “I can’t
+stop—I must go home. If I feel better, later on, I’ll come back. I’m
+very sorry, but I _must_ go.” At that instant Captain Everard once more
+stood there, producing in her agitated spirit, by his real presence,
+the strangest, quickest revolution. He stopped her off without knowing
+it, and by the time he had been a minute in the shop she felt herself
+saved.
+
+That was from the first minute how she thought of it. There were again
+other persons with whom she was occupied, and again the situation could
+only be expressed by their silence. It was expressed, of a truth, in a
+larger phrase than ever yet, for her eyes now spoke to him with a kind
+of supplication. “Be quiet, be quiet!” they pleaded; and they saw his
+own reply: “I’ll do whatever you say; I won’t even look at you—see,
+see!” They kept conveying thus, with the friendliest liberality, that
+they wouldn’t look, quite positively wouldn’t. What she was to see was
+that he hovered at the other end of the counter, Mr. Buckton’s end, and
+surrendered himself again to that frustration. It quickly proved so
+great indeed that what she was to see further was how he turned away
+before he was attended to, and hung off, waiting, smoking, looking
+about the shop; how he went over to Mr. Cocker’s own counter and
+appeared to price things, gave in fact presently two or three orders
+and put down money, stood there a long time with his back to her,
+considerately abstaining from any glance round to see if she were free.
+It at last came to pass in this way that he had remained in the shop
+longer than she had ever yet known to do, and that, nevertheless, when
+he did turn about she could see him time himself—she was freshly taken
+up—and cross straight to her postal subordinate, whom some one else had
+released. He had in his hand all this while neither letters nor
+telegrams, and now that he was close to her—for she was close to the
+counter-clerk—it brought her heart into her mouth merely to see him
+look at her neighbour and open his lips. She was too nervous to bear
+it. He asked for a Post-Office Guide, and the young man whipped out a
+new one; whereupon he said he wished not to purchase, but only to
+consult one a moment; with which, the copy kept on loan being produced,
+he once more wandered off.
+
+What was he doing to her? What did he want of her? Well, it was just
+the aggravation of his “See here!” She felt at this moment strangely
+and portentously afraid of him—had in her ears the hum of a sense that,
+should it come to that kind of tension, she must fly on the spot to
+Chalk Farm. Mixed with her dread and with her reflexion was the idea
+that, if he wanted her so much as he seemed to show, it might be after
+all simply to do for him the “anything” she had promised, the
+“everything” she had thought it so fine to bring out to Mr. Mudge. He
+might want her to help him, might have some particular appeal; though
+indeed his manner didn’t denote that—denoted on the contrary an
+embarrassment, an indecision, something of a desire not so much to be
+helped as to be treated rather more nicely than she had treated him the
+other time. Yes, he considered quite probably that he had help rather
+to offer than to ask for. Still, none the less, when he again saw her
+free he continued to keep away from her; when he came back with his
+_Guide_ it was Mr. Buckton he caught—it was from Mr. Buckton he
+obtained half-a-crown’s-worth of stamps.
+
+After asking for the stamps he asked, quite as a second thought, for a
+postal-order for ten shillings. What did he want with so many stamps
+when he wrote so few letters? How could he enclose a postal-order in a
+telegram? She expected him, the next thing, to go into the corner and
+make up one of his telegrams—half a dozen of them—on purpose to prolong
+his presence. She had so completely stopped looking at him that she
+could only guess his movements—guess even where his eyes rested.
+Finally she saw him make a dash that might have been toward the nook
+where the forms were hung; and at this she suddenly felt that she
+couldn’t keep it up. The counter-clerk had just taken a telegram from a
+slavey, and, to give herself something to cover her, she snatched it
+out of his hand. The gesture was so violent that he gave her in return
+an odd look, and she also perceived that Mr. Buckton noticed it. The
+latter personage, with a quick stare at her, appeared for an instant to
+wonder whether his snatching it in _his_ turn mightn’t be the thing she
+would least like, and she anticipated this practical criticism by the
+frankest glare she had ever given him. It sufficed: this time it
+paralysed him; and she sought with her trophy the refuge of the
+sounder.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+
+It was repeated the next day; it went on for three days; and at the end
+of that time she knew what to think. When, at the beginning, she had
+emerged from her temporary shelter Captain Everard had quitted the
+shop; and he had not come again that evening, as it had struck her he
+possibly might—might all the more easily that there were numberless
+persons who came, morning and afternoon, numberless times, so that he
+wouldn’t necessarily have attracted attention. The second day it was
+different and yet on the whole worse. His access to her had become
+possible—she felt herself even reaping the fruit of her yesterday’s
+glare at Mr. Buckton; but transacting his business with him didn’t
+simplify—it could, in spite of the rigour of circumstance, feed so her
+new conviction. The rigour was tremendous, and his telegrams—not now
+mere pretexts for getting at her—were apparently genuine; yet the
+conviction had taken but a night to develop. It could be simply enough
+expressed; she had had the glimmer of it the day before in her idea
+that he needed no more help than she had already given; that it was
+help he himself was prepared to render. He had come up to town but for
+three or four days; he had been absolutely obliged to be absent after
+the other time; yet he would, now that he was face to face with her,
+stay on as much longer as she liked. Little by little it was thus
+clarified, though from the first flash of his re-appearance she had
+read into it the real essence.
+
+That was what the night before, at eight o’clock, her hour to go, had
+made her hang back and dawdle. She did last things or pretended to do
+them; to be in the cage had suddenly become her safety, and she was
+literally afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside.
+_He_ might be waiting; it was he who was her alternate self, and of him
+she was afraid. The most extraordinary change had taken place in her
+from the moment of her catching the impression he seemed to have
+returned on purpose to give her. Just before she had done so, on that
+bewitched afternoon, she had seen herself approach without a scruple
+the porter at Park Chambers; then as the effect of the rush of a
+consciousness quite altered she had on at last quitting Cocker’s, gone
+straight home for the first time since her return from Bournemouth. She
+had passed his door every night for weeks, but nothing would have
+induced her to pass it now. This change was the tribute of her fear—the
+result of a change in himself as to which she needed no more
+explanation than his mere face vividly gave her; strange though it was
+to find an element of deterrence in the object that she regarded as the
+most beautiful in the world. He had taken it from her in the Park that
+night that she wanted him not to propose to her to sup; but he had put
+away the lesson by this time—he practically proposed supper every time
+he looked at her. This was what, for that matter, mainly filled the
+three days. He came in twice on each of these, and it was as if he came
+in to give her a chance to relent. That was after all, she said to
+herself in the intervals, the most that he did. There were ways, she
+fully recognised, in which he spared her, and other particular ways as
+to which she meant that her silence should be full to him of exquisite
+pleading. The most particular of all was his not being outside, at the
+corner, when she quitted the place for the night. This he might so
+easily have been—so easily if he hadn’t been so nice. She continued to
+recognise in his forbearance the fruit of her dumb supplication, and
+the only compensation he found for it was the harmless freedom of being
+able to appear to say: “Yes, I’m in town only for three or four days,
+but, you know, I _would_ stay on.” He struck her as calling attention
+each day, each hour, to the rapid ebb of time; he exaggerated to the
+point of putting it that there were only two days more, that there was
+at last, dreadfully, only one.
+
+There were other things still that he struck her as doing with a
+special intention; as to the most marked of which—unless indeed it were
+the most obscure—she might well have marvelled that it didn’t seem to
+her more horrid. It was either the frenzy of her imagination or the
+disorder of his baffled passion that gave her once or twice the vision
+of his putting down redundant money—sovereigns not concerned with the
+little payments he was perpetually making—so that she might give him
+some sign of helping him to slip them over to her. What was most
+extraordinary in this impression was the amount of excuse that, with
+some incoherence, she found for him. He wanted to pay her because there
+was nothing to pay her for. He wanted to offer her things he knew she
+wouldn’t take. He wanted to show her how much he respected her by
+giving her the supreme chance to show _him_ she was respectable. Over
+the dryest transactions, at any rate, their eyes had out these
+questions. On the third day he put in a telegram that had evidently
+something of the same point as the stray sovereigns—a message that was
+in the first place concocted and that on a second thought he took back
+from her before she had stamped it. He had given her time to read it
+and had only then bethought himself that he had better not send it. If
+it was not to Lady Bradeen at Twindle—where she knew her ladyship then
+to be—this was because an address to Doctor Buzzard at Brickwood was
+just as good, with the added merit of its not giving away quite so much
+a person whom he had still, after all, in a manner to consider. It was
+of course most complicated, only half lighted; but there was,
+discernibly enough, a scheme of communication in which Lady Bradeen at
+Twindle and Dr. Buzzard at Brickwood were, within limits, one and the
+same person. The words he had shown her and then taken back consisted,
+at all events, of the brief but vivid phrase “Absolutely impossible.”
+The point was not that she should transmit it; the point was just that
+she should see it. What was absolutely impossible was that before he
+had setted something at Cocker’s he should go either to Twindle or to
+Brickwood.
+
+The logic of this, in turn, for herself, was that she could lend
+herself to no settlement so long as she so intensely knew. What she
+knew was that he was, almost under peril of life, clenched in a
+situation: therefore how could she also know where a poor girl in the
+P.O. might really stand? It was more and more between them that if he
+might convey to her he was free, with all the impossible locked away
+into a closed chapter, her own case might become different for her, she
+might understand and meet him and listen. But he could convey nothing
+of the sort, and he only fidgeted and floundered in his want of power.
+The chapter wasn’t in the least closed, not for the other party; and
+the other party had a pull, somehow and somewhere: this his whole
+attitude and expression confessed, at the same time that they entreated
+her not to remember and not to mind. So long as she did remember and
+did mind he could only circle about and go and come, doing futile
+things of which he was ashamed. He was ashamed of his two words to Dr.
+Buzzard; he went out of the shop as soon as he had crumpled up the
+paper again and thrust it into his pocket. It had been an abject little
+exposure of dreadful impossible passion. He appeared in fact to be too
+ashamed to come back. He had once more left town, and a first week
+elapsed, and a second. He had had naturally to return to the real
+mistress of his fate; she had insisted—she knew how to insist, and he
+couldn’t put in another hour. There was always a day when she called
+time. It was known to our young friend moreover that he had now been
+dispatching telegrams from other offices. She knew at last so much that
+she had quite lost her earlier sense of merely guessing. There were no
+different shades of distinctness—it all bounced out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+
+Eighteen days elapsed, and she had begun to think it probable she
+should never see him again. He too then understood now: he had made out
+that she had secrets and reasons and impediments, that even a poor girl
+at the P.O. might have her complications. With the charm she had cast
+on him lightened by distance he had suffered a final delicacy to speak
+to him, had made up his mind that it would be only decent to let her
+alone. Never so much as during these latter days had she felt the
+precariousness of their relation—the happy beautiful untroubled
+original one, if it could only have been restored—in which the public
+servant and the casual public only were concerned. It hung at the best
+by the merest silken thread, which was at the mercy of any accident and
+might snap at any minute. She arrived by the end of the fortnight at
+the highest sense of actual fitness, never doubting that her decision
+was now complete. She would just give him a few days more to come back
+to her on a proper impersonal basis—for even to an embarrassing
+representative of the casual public a public servant with a conscience
+did owe something—and then would signify to Mr. Mudge that she was
+ready for the little home. It had been visited, in the further talk she
+had had with him at Bournemouth, from garret to cellar, and they had
+especially lingered, with their respectively darkened brows, before the
+niche into which it was to be broached to her mother that she must find
+means to fit.
+
+He had put it to her more definitely than before that his calculations
+had allowed for that dingy presence, and he had thereby marked the
+greatest impression he had ever made on her. It was a stroke superior
+even again to his handling of the drunken soldier. What she considered
+that in the face of it she hung on at Cocker’s for was something she
+could only have described as the common fairness of a last word. Her
+actual last word had been, till it should be superseded, that she
+wouldn’t forsake her other friend, and it stuck to her through thick
+and thin that she was still at her post and on her honour. This other
+friend had shown so much beauty of conduct already that he would surely
+after all just re-appear long enough to relieve her, to give her
+something she could take away. She saw it, caught it, at times, his
+parting present; and there were moments when she felt herself sitting
+like a beggar with a hand held out to almsgiver who only fumbled. She
+hadn’t taken the sovereigns, but she _would_ take the penny. She heard,
+in imagination, on the counter, the ring of the copper. “Don’t put
+yourself out any longer,” he would say, “for so bad a case. You’ve done
+all there is to be done. I thank and acquit and release you. Our lives
+take us. I don’t know much—though I’ve really been interested—about
+yours, but I suppose you’ve got one. Mine at any rate will take
+_me_—and where it will. Heigh-ho! Good-bye.” And then once more, for
+the sweetest faintest flower of all: “Only, I say—see here!” She had
+framed the whole picture with a squareness that included also the image
+of how again she would decline to “see there,” decline, as she might
+say, to see anywhere, see anything. Yet it befell that just in the fury
+of this escape she saw more than ever.
+
+He came back one night with a rush, near the moment of their closing,
+and showed her a face so different and new, so upset and anxious, that
+almost anything seemed to look out of it but clear recognition. He
+poked in a telegram very much as if the simple sense of pressure, the
+distress of extreme haste, had blurred the remembrance of where in
+particular he was. But as she met his eyes a light came; it broke
+indeed on the spot into a positive conscious glare. That made up for
+everything, since it was an instant proclamation of the celebrated
+“danger”; it seemed to pour things out in a flood. “Oh yes, here it
+is—it’s upon me at last! Forget, for God’s sake, my having worried or
+bored you, and just help me, just _save_ me, by getting this off
+without the loss of a second!” Something grave had clearly occurred, a
+crisis declared itself. She recognised immediately the person to whom
+the telegram was addressed—the Miss Dolman of Parade Lodge to whom Lady
+Bradeen had wired, at Dover, on the last occasion, and whom she had
+then, with her recollection of previous arrangements, fitted into a
+particular setting. Miss Dolman had figured before and not figured
+since, but she was now the subject of an imperative appeal. “Absolutely
+necessary to see you. Take last train Victoria if you can catch it. If
+not, earliest morning, and answer me direct either way.”
+
+“Reply paid?” said the girl. Mr. Buckton had just departed and the
+counter-clerk was at the sounder. There was no other representative of
+the public, and she had never yet, as it seemed to her, not even in the
+street or in the Park, been so alone with him.
+
+“Oh yes, reply paid, and as sharp as possible, please.”
+
+She affixed the stamps in a flash. “She’ll catch the train!” she then
+declared to him breathlessly, as if she could absolutely guarantee it.
+
+“I don’t know—I hope so. It’s awfully important. So kind of you.
+Awfully sharp, please.” It was wonderfully innocent now, his oblivion
+of all but his danger. Anything else that had ever passed between them
+was utterly out of it. Well, she had wanted him to be impersonal!
+
+There was less of the same need therefore, happily, for herself; yet
+she only took time, before she flew to the sounder, to gasp at him:
+“You‘re in trouble?”
+
+“Horrid, horrid—there’s a row!” But they parted, on it, in the next
+breath; and as she dashed at the sounder, almost pushing, in her
+violence, the counter-clerk off the stool, she caught the bang with
+which, at Cocker’s door, in his further precipitation, he closed the
+apron of the cab into which he had leaped. As he rebounded to some
+other precaution suggested by his alarm, his appeal to Miss Dolman
+flashed straight away.
+
+But she had not, on the morrow, been in the place five minutes before
+he was with her again, still more discomposed and quite, now, as she
+said to herself, like a frightened child coming to its mother. Her
+companions were there, and she felt it to be remarkable how, in the
+presence of his agitation, his mere scared exposed nature, she suddenly
+ceased to mind. It came to her as it had never come to her before that
+with absolute directness and assurance they might carry almost anything
+off. He had nothing to send—she was sure he had been wiring all
+over—and yet his business was evidently huge. There was nothing but
+that in his eyes—not a glimmer of reference or memory. He was almost
+haggard with anxiety and had clearly not slept a wink. Her pity for him
+would have given her any courage, and she seemed to know at last why
+she had been such a fool. “She didn’t come?” she panted.
+
+“Oh yes, she came; but there has been some mistake. We want a
+telegram.”
+
+“A telegram?”
+
+“One that was sent from here ever so long ago. There was something in
+it that has to be recovered. Something very, very important, please—we
+want it immediately.”
+
+He really spoke to her as if she had been some strange young woman at
+Knightsbridge or Paddington; but it had no other effect on her than to
+give her the measure of his tremendous flurry. Then it was that, above
+all, she felt how much she had missed in the gaps and blanks and absent
+answers—how much she had had to dispense with: it was now black
+darkness save for this little wild red flare. So much as that she saw,
+so much her mind dealt with. One of the lovers was quaking somewhere
+out of town, and the other was quaking just where he stood. This was
+vivid enough, and after an instant she knew it was all she wanted. She
+wanted no detail, no fact—she wanted no nearer vision of discovery or
+shame. “When was your telegram? Do you mean you sent it from here?” She
+tried to do the young woman at Knightsbridge.
+
+“Oh yes, from here—several weeks ago. Five, six, seven”—he was confused
+and impatient—“don’t you remember?”
+
+“Remember?” she could scarcely keep out of her face, at the word, the
+strangest of smiles.
+
+But the way he didn’t catch what it meant was perhaps even stranger
+still. “I mean, don’t you keep the old ones?”
+
+“For a certain time.”
+
+“But how long?”
+
+She thought; she _must_ do the young woman, and she knew exactly what
+the young woman would say and, still more, wouldn’t. “Can you give me
+the date?”
+
+“Oh God, no! It was some time or other in August—toward the end. It was
+to the same address as the one I gave you last night.”
+
+“Oh!” said the girl, knowing at this the deepest thrill she had ever
+felt. It came to her there, with her eyes on his face, that she held
+the whole thing in her hand, held it as she held her pencil, which
+might have broken at that instant in her tightened grip. This made her
+feel like the very fountain of fate, but the emotion was such a flood
+that she had to press it back with all her force. That was positively
+the reason, again, of her flute-like Paddington tone. “You can’t give
+us anything a little nearer?” Her “little” and her “us” came straight
+from Paddington. These things were no false note for him—his difficulty
+absorbed them all. The eyes with which he pressed her, and in the
+depths of which she read terror and rage and literal tears, were just
+the same he would have shown any other prim person.
+
+“I don’t know the date. I only know the thing went from here, and just
+about the time I speak of. It wasn’t delivered, you see. We’ve got to
+recover it.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+
+She was as struck with the beauty of his plural pronoun as she had
+judged he might be with that of her own; but she knew now so well what
+she was about that she could almost play with him and with her new-born
+joy. “You say ‘about the time you speak of.’ But I don’t think you
+speak of an exact time—_do_ you?”
+
+He looked splendidly helpless. “That’s just what I want to find out.
+Don’t you keep the old ones?—can’t you look it up?”
+
+Our young lady—still at Paddington—turned the question over. “It wasn’t
+delivered?”
+
+“Yes, it _was_; yet, at the same time, don’t you know? it wasn’t.” He
+just hung back, but he brought it out. “I mean it was intercepted,
+don’t you know? and there was something in it.” He paused again and, as
+if to further his quest and woo and supplicate success and recovery,
+even smiled with an effort at the agreeable that was almost ghastly and
+that turned the knife in her tenderness. What must be the pain of it
+all, of the open gulf and the throbbing fever, when this was the mere
+hot breath? “We want to get what was in it—to know what it was.”
+
+“I see—I see.” She managed just the accent they had at Paddington when
+they stared like dead fish. “And you have no clue?”
+
+“Not at all—I’ve the clue I’ve just given you.”
+
+“Oh the last of August?” If she kept it up long enough she would make
+him really angry.
+
+“Yes, and the address, as I’ve said.”
+
+“Oh the same as last night?”
+
+He visibly quivered, as with a gleam of hope; but it only poured oil on
+her quietude, and she was still deliberate. She ranged some papers.
+“Won’t you look?” he went on.
+
+“I remember your coming,” she replied.
+
+He blinked with a new uneasiness; it might have begun to come to him,
+through her difference, that he was somehow different himself. “You
+were much quicker then, you know!”
+
+“So were you—you must do me that justice,” she answered with a smile.
+“But let me see. Wasn’t it Dover?”
+
+“Yes, Miss Dolman—”
+
+“Parade Lodge, Parade Terrace?”
+
+“Exactly—thank you so awfully much!” He began to hope again. “Then you
+_have_ it—the other one?”
+
+She hesitated afresh; she quite dangled him. “It was brought by a
+lady?”
+
+“Yes; and she put in by mistake something wrong. That’s what we’ve got
+to get hold of!” Heavens, what was he going to say?—flooding poor
+Paddington with wild betrayals! She couldn’t too much, for her joy,
+dangle him, yet she couldn’t either, for his dignity, warn or control
+or check him. What she found herself doing was just to treat herself to
+the middle way. “It was intercepted?”
+
+“It fell into the wrong hands. But there’s something in it,” he
+continued to blurt out, “that _may_ be all right. That is, if it’s
+wrong, don’t you know? It’s all right if it’s wrong,” he remarkably
+explained.
+
+What _was_ he, on earth, going to say? Mr. Buckton and the
+counter-clerk were already interested; no one _would_ have the decency
+to come in; and she was divided between her particular terror for him
+and her general curiosity. Yet she already saw with what brilliancy she
+could add, to carry the thing off, a little false knowledge to all her
+real. “I quite understand,” she said with benevolent, with almost
+patronising quickness. “The lady has forgotten what she did put.”
+
+“Forgotten most wretchedly, and it’s an immense inconvenience. It has
+only just been found that it didn’t get there; so that if we could
+immediately have it—”
+
+“Immediately?”
+
+“Every minute counts. You _have_,” he pleaded, “surely got them on
+file?”
+
+“So that you can see it on the spot?”
+
+“Yes, please—this very minute.” The counter rang with his knuckles,
+with the knob of his stick, with his panic of alarm. “Do, _do_ hunt it
+up!” he repeated.
+
+“I dare say we could get it for you,” the girl weetly returned.
+
+“Get it?”—he looked aghast. “When?”
+
+“Probably by to-morrow.”
+
+“Then it isn’t here?”—his face was pitiful.
+
+She caught only the uncovered gleams that peeped out of the blackness,
+and she wondered what complication, even among the most supposable, the
+very worst, could be bad enough to account for the degree of his
+terror. There were twists and turns, there were places where the screw
+drew blood, that she couldn’t guess. She was more and more glad she
+didn’t want to. “It has been sent on.”
+
+“But how do you know if you don’t look?”
+
+She gave him a smile that was meant to be, in the absolute irony of its
+propriety, quite divine. “It was August 23rd, and we’ve nothing later
+here than August 27th.”
+
+Something leaped into his face. “27th—23rd? Then you’re sure? You
+know?”
+
+She felt she scarce knew what—as if she might soon be pounced upon for
+some lurid connexion with a scandal. It was the queerest of all
+sensations, for she had heard, she had read, of these things, and the
+wealth of her intimacy with them at Cocker’s might be supposed to have
+schooled and seasoned her. This particular one that she had really
+quite lived with was, after all, an old story; yet what it had been
+before was dim and distant beside the touch under which she now winced.
+Scandal?—it had never been but a silly word. Now it was a great tense
+surface, and the surface was somehow Captain Everard’s wonderful face.
+Deep down in his eyes a picture, a scene—a great place like a chamber
+of justice, where, before a watching crowd, a poor girl, exposed but
+heroic, swore with a quavering voice to a document, proved an _alibi_,
+supplied a link. In this picture she bravely took her place. “It was
+the 23rd.”
+
+“Then can’t you get it this morning—or some time to-day?”
+
+She considered, still holding him with her look, which she then turned
+on her two companions, who were by this time unreservedly enlisted. She
+didn’t care—not a scrap, and she glanced about for a piece of paper.
+With this she had to recognise the rigour of official thrift—a morsel
+of blackened blotter was the only loose paper to be seen. “Have you got
+a card?” she said to her visitor. He was quite away from Paddington
+now, and the next instant, pocket-book in hand, he had whipped a card
+out. She gave no glance at the name on it—only turned it to the other
+side. She continued to hold him, she felt at present, as she had never
+held him; and her command of her colleagues was for the moment not less
+marked. She wrote something on the back of the card and pushed it
+across to him.
+
+He fairly glared at it. “Seven, nine, four—”
+
+“Nine, six, one”—she obligingly completed the number. “Is it right?”
+she smiled.
+
+He took the whole thing in with a flushed intensity; then there broke
+out in him a visibility of relief that was simply a tremendous
+exposure. He shone at them all like a tall lighthouse, embracing even,
+for sympathy, the blinking young men. “By all the powers—it’s wrong!”
+And without another look, without a word of thanks, without time for
+anything or anybody, he turned on them the broad back of his great
+stature, straightened his triumphant shoulders, and strode out of the
+place.
+
+She was left confronted with her habitual critics. “‘If it’s wrong it’s
+all right!’” she extravagantly quoted to them.
+
+The counter-clerk was really awe-stricken. “But how did you know,
+dear?”
+
+“I remembered, love!”
+
+Mr. Buckton, on the contrary, was rude. “And what game is that, miss?”
+
+No happiness she had ever known came within miles of it, and some
+minutes elapsed before she could recall herself sufficiently to reply
+that it was none of his business.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+
+If life at Cocker’s, with the dreadful drop of August, had lost
+something of its savour, she had not been slow to infer that a heavier
+blight had fallen on the graceful industry of Mrs. Jordan.
+
+With Lord Rye and Lady Ventnor and Mrs. Bubb all out of town, with the
+blinds down on all the homes of luxury, this ingenious woman might well
+have found her wonderful taste left quite on her hands. She bore up,
+however, in a way that began by exciting much of her young friend’s
+esteem; they perhaps even more frequently met as the wine of life
+flowed less free from other sources, and each, in the lack of better
+diversion, carried on with more mystification for the other an
+intercourse that consisted not a little in peeping out and drawing
+back. Each waited for the other to commit herself, each profusely
+curtained for the other the limits of low horizons. Mrs. Jordan was
+indeed probably the more reckless skirmisher; nothing could exceed her
+frequent incoherence unless it was indeed her occasional bursts of
+confidence. Her account of her private affairs rose and fell like a
+flame in the wind—sometimes the bravest bonfire and sometimes a handful
+of ashes. This our young woman took to be an effect of the position, at
+one moment and another, of the famous door of the great world. She had
+been struck in one of her ha’penny volumes with the translation of a
+French proverb according to which such a door, any door, had to be
+either open or shut; and it seemed part of the precariousness of Mrs.
+Jordan’s life that hers mostly managed to be neither. There had been
+occasions when it appeared to gape wide—fairly to woo her across its
+threshold; there had been others, of an order distinctly disconcerting,
+when it was all but banged in her face. On the whole, however, she had
+evidently not lost heart; these still belonged to the class of things
+in spite of which she looked well. She intimated that the profits of
+her trade had swollen so as to float her through any state of the tide,
+and she had, besides this, a hundred profundities and explanations.
+
+She rose superior, above all, on the happy fact that there were always
+gentlemen in town and that gentlemen were her greatest admirers;
+gentlemen from the City in especial—as to whom she was full of
+information about the passion and pride excited in such breasts by the
+elements of her charming commerce. The City men _did_, in short, go in
+for flowers. There was a certain type of awfully smart stockbroker—Lord
+Rye called them Jews and bounders, but she didn’t care—whose
+extravagance, she more than once threw out, had really, if one had any
+conscience, to be forcibly restrained. It was not perhaps a pure love
+of beauty: it was a matter of vanity and a sign of business; they
+wished to crush their rivals, and that was one of their weapons. Mrs.
+Jordan’s shrewdness was extreme; she knew in any case her customer—she
+dealt, as she said, with all sorts; and it was at the worst a race for
+her—a race even in the dull months—from one set of chambers to another.
+And then, after all, there were also still the ladies; the ladies of
+stockbroking circles were perpetually up and down. They were not quite
+perhaps Mrs. Bubb or Lady Ventnor; but you couldn’t tell the difference
+unless you quarrelled with them, and then you knew it only by their
+making-up sooner. These ladies formed the branch of her subject on
+which she most swayed in the breeze; to that degree that her confidant
+had ended with an inference or two tending to banish regret for
+opportunities not embraced. There were indeed tea-gowns that Mrs.
+Jordan described—but tea-gowns were not the whole of respectability,
+and it was odd that a clergyman’s widow should sometimes speak as if
+she almost thought so. She came back, it was true, unfailingly to Lord
+Rye, never, evidently, quite losing sight of him even on the longest
+excursions. That he was kindness itself had become in fact the very
+moral it all pointed—pointed in strange flashes of the poor woman’s
+nearsighted eyes. She launched at her young friend portentous looks,
+solemn heralds of some extraordinary communication. The communication
+itself, from week to week, hung fire; but it was to the facts over
+which it hovered that she owed her power of going on. “They _are_, in
+one way _and_ another,” she often emphasised, “a tower of strength”;
+and as the allusion was to the aristocracy the girl could quite wonder
+why, if they were so in “one way,” they should require to be so in two.
+She thoroughly knew, however, how many ways Mrs. Jordan counted in. It
+all meant simply that her fate was pressing her close. If that fate was
+to be sealed at the matrimonial altar it was perhaps not remarkable
+that she shouldn’t come all at once to the scratch of overwhelming a
+mere telegraphist. It would necessarily present to such a person a
+prospect of regretful sacrifice. Lord Rye—if it _was_ Lord Rye—wouldn’t
+be “kind” to a nonentity of that sort, even though people quite as good
+had been.
+
+One Sunday afternoon in November they went, by arrangement, to church
+together; after which—on the inspiration of the moment the arrangement
+had not included it—they proceeded to Mrs. Jordan’s lodging in the
+region of Maida Vale. She had raved to her friend about her service of
+predilection; she was excessively “high,” and had more than once wished
+to introduce the girl to the same comfort and privilege. There was a
+thick brown fog and Maida Vale tasted of acrid smoke; but they had been
+sitting among chants and incense and wonderful music, during which,
+though the effect of such things on her mind was great, our young lady
+had indulged in a series of reflexions but indirectly related to them.
+One of these was the result of Mrs. Jordan’s having said to her on the
+way, and with a certain fine significance, that Lord Rye had been for
+some time in town. She had spoken as if it were a circumstance to which
+little required to be added—as if the bearing of such an item on her
+life might easily be grasped. Perhaps it was the wonder of whether Lord
+Rye wished to marry her that made her guest, with thoughts straying to
+that quarter, quite determine that some other nuptials also should take
+place at Saint Julian’s. Mr. Mudge was still an attendant at his
+Wesleyan chapel, but this was the least of her worries—it had never
+even vexed her enough for her to so much as name it to Mrs. Jordan. Mr.
+Mudge’s form of worship was one of several things—they made up in
+superiority and beauty for what they wanted in number—that she had long
+ago settled he should take from her, and she had now moreover for the
+first time definitely established her own. Its principal feature was
+that it was to be the same as that of Mrs. Jordan and Lord Rye; which
+was indeed very much what she said to her hostess as they sat together
+later on. The brown fog was in this hostess’s little parlour, where it
+acted as a postponement of the question of there being, besides,
+anything else than the teacups and a pewter pot and a very black little
+fire and a paraffin lamp without a shade. There was at any rate no sign
+of a flower; it was not for herself Mrs. Jordan gathered sweets. The
+girl waited till they had had a cup of tea—waited for the announcement
+that she fairly believed her friend had, this time, possessed herself
+of her formally at last to make; but nothing came, after the interval,
+save a little poke at the fire, which was like the clearing of a throat
+for a speech.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+
+“I think you must have heard me speak of Mr. Drake?” Mrs. Jordan had
+never looked so queer, nor her smile so suggestive of a large
+benevolent bite.
+
+“Mr. Drake? Oh yes; isn’t he a friend of Lord Rye?”
+
+“A great and trusted friend. Almost—I may say—a loved friend.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan’s “almost” had such an oddity that her companion was moved,
+rather flippantly perhaps, to take it up. “Don’t people as good as love
+their friends when they I trust them?”
+
+It pulled up a little the eulogist of Mr. Drake. “Well, my dear, I love
+_you_—”
+
+“But you don’t trust me?” the girl unmercifully asked.
+
+Again Mrs. Jordan paused—still she looked queer. “Yes,” she replied
+with a certain austerity; “that’s exactly what I’m about to give you
+rather a remarkable proof of.” The sense of its being remarkable was
+already so strong that, while she bridled a little, this held her
+auditor in a momentary muteness of submission. “Mr. Drake has rendered
+his lordship for several years services that his lordship has highly
+appreciated and that make it all the more—a—unexpected that they
+should, perhaps a little suddenly, separate.”
+
+“Separate?” Our young lady was mystified, but she tried to be
+interested; and she already saw that she had put the saddle on the
+wrong horse. She had heard something of Mr. Drake, who was a member of
+his lordship’s circle—the member with whom, apparently, Mrs. Jordan’s
+avocations had most happened to throw her. She was only a little
+puzzled at the “separation.” “Well, at any rate,” she smiled, “if they
+separate as friends—!”
+
+“Oh his lordship takes the greatest interest in Mr. Drake’s future.
+He’ll do anything for him; he has in fact just done a great deal. There
+_must_, you know, be changes—!”
+
+“No one knows it better than I,” the girl said. She wished to draw her
+interlocutress out. “There will be changes enough for me.”
+
+“You’re leaving Cocker’s?”
+
+The ornament of that establishment waited a moment to answer, and then
+it was indirect. “Tell me what _you’re_ doing.”
+
+“Well, what will you think of it?”
+
+“Why that you’ve found the opening you were always so sure of.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan, on this, appeared to muse with embarrassed intensity. “I
+was always sure, yes—and yet I often wasn’t!”
+
+“Well, I hope you’re sure now. Sure, I mean, of Mr. Drake.”
+
+“Yes, my dear, I think I may say I _am_. I kept him going till I was.”
+
+“Then he’s yours?”
+
+“My very own.”
+
+“How nice! And awfully rich?” our young woman went on.
+
+Mrs. Jordan showed promptly enough that she loved for higher things.
+“Awfully handsome—six foot two. And he _has_ put by.”
+
+“Quite like Mr. Mudge, then!” that gentleman’s friend rather
+desperately exclaimed.
+
+“Oh not _quite!_” Mr. Drake’s was ambiguous about it, but the name of
+Mr. Mudge had evidently given her some sort of stimulus. “He’ll have
+more opportunity now, at any rate. He’s going to Lady Bradeen.”
+
+“To Lady Bradeen?” This was bewilderment. “‘Going—’?”
+
+The girl had seen, from the way Mrs. Jordan looked at her, that the
+effect of the name had been to make her let something out. “Do you know
+her?”
+
+She floundered, but she found her feet. “Well, you’ll remember I’ve
+often told you that if you’ve grand clients I have them too.”
+
+“Yes,” said Mrs. Jordan; “but the great difference is that you hate
+yours, whereas I really love mine. _Do_ you know Lady Bradeen?” she
+pursued.
+
+“Down to the ground! She’s always in and out.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan’s foolish eyes confessed, in fixing themselves on this
+sketch, to a degree of wonder and even of envy. But she bore up and,
+with a certain gaiety, “Do you hate _her_?” she demanded.
+
+Her visitor’s reply was prompt. “Dear no!—not nearly so much as some of
+them. She’s too outrageously beautiful.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan continued to gaze. “Outrageously?”
+
+“Well, yes; deliciously.” What was really delicious was Mrs. Jordan’s
+vagueness. “You don’t know her—you’ve not seen her?” her guest lightly
+continued.
+
+“No, but I’ve heard a great deal about her.”
+
+“So have I!” our young lady exclaimed.
+
+Jordan looked an instant as if she suspected her good faith, or at
+least her seriousness. “You know some friend—?”
+
+“Of Lady Bradeen’s? Oh yes—I know one.”
+
+“Only one?”
+
+The girl laughed out. “Only one—but he’s so intimate.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan just hesitated. “He’s a gentleman?”
+
+“Yes, he’s not a lady.”
+
+Her interlocutress appeared to muse. “She’s immensely surrounded.”
+
+“She _will_ be—with Mr. Drake!”
+
+Mrs. Jordan’s gaze became strangely fixed. “Is she _very_
+good-looking?”
+
+“The handsomest person I know.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan continued to contemplate. “Well, _I_ know some beauties.”
+Then with her odd jerkiness: “Do you think she looks _good_?” she
+inquired.
+
+“Because that’s not always the case with the good-looking?”—the other
+took it up. “No, indeed, it isn’t: that’s one thing Cocker’s has taught
+me. Still, there are some people who have everything. Lady Bradeen, at
+any rate, has enough: eyes and a nose and a mouth, a complexion, a
+figure—”
+
+“A figure?” Mrs. Jordan almost broke in.
+
+“A figure, a head of hair!” The girl made a little conscious motion
+that seemed to let the hair all down, and her companion watched the
+wonderful show. “But Mr. Drake _is_ another—?”
+
+“Another?”—Mrs. Jordan’s thoughts had to come back from a distance.
+
+“Of her ladyship’s admirers. He’s ‘going,’ you say, to her?”
+
+At this Mrs. Jordan really faltered. “She has engaged him.”
+
+“Engaged him?”—our young woman was quite at sea.
+
+“In the same capacity as Lord Rye.”
+
+“And was Lord Rye engaged?”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+
+Mrs. Jordan looked away from her now—looked, she thought, rather
+injured and, as if trifled with, even a little angry. The mention of
+Lady Bradeen had frustrated for a while the convergence of our
+heroine’s thoughts; but with this impression of her old friend’s
+combined impatience and diffidence they began again to whirl round her,
+and continued it till one of them appeared to dart at her, out of the
+dance, as if with a sharp peck. It came to her with a lively shock,
+with a positive sting, that Mr. Drake was—could it be possible? With
+the idea she found herself afresh on the edge of laughter, of a sudden
+and strange perversity of mirth. Mr. Drake loomed, in a swift image,
+before her; such a figure as she had seen in open doorways of houses in
+Cocker’s quarter—majestic, middle-aged, erect, flanked on either side
+by a footman and taking the name of a visitor. Mr. Drake then verily
+_was_ a person who opened the door! Before she had time, however, to
+recover from the effect of her evocation, she was offered a vision
+which quite engulfed it. It was communicated to her somehow that the
+face with which she had seen it rise prompted Mrs. Jordan to dash, a
+bit wildly, at something, at anything, that might attenuate criticism.
+“Lady Bradeen’s re-arranging—she’s going to be married.”
+
+“Married?” The girl echoed it ever so softly, but there it was at last.
+
+“Didn’t you know it?”
+
+She summoned all her sturdiness. “No, she hasn’t told me.”
+
+“And her friends—haven’t they?”
+
+“I haven’t seen any of them lately. I’m not so fortunate as _you_.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan gathered herself. “Then you haven’t even heard of Lord
+Bradeen’s death?”
+
+Her comrade, unable for a moment to speak, gave a slow headshake. “You
+know it from Mr. Drake?” It was better surely not to learn things at
+all than to learn them by the butler.
+
+“She tells him everything.”
+
+“And he tells _you_—I see.” Our young lady got up; recovering her muff
+and her gloves she smiled. “Well, I haven’t unfortunately any Mr.
+Drake. I congratulate you with all my heart. Even without your sort of
+assistance, however, there’s a trifle here and there that I do pick up.
+I gather that if she’s to marry any one it must quite necessarily be my
+friend.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan was now also on her feet. “Is Captain Everard your friend?”
+
+The girl considered, drawing on a glove. “I saw, at one time, an
+immense deal of him.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan looked hard at the glove, but she hadn’t after all waited
+for that to be sorry it wasn’t cleaner. “What time was that?”
+
+“It must have been the time you were seeing so much of Mr. Drake.” She
+had now fairly taken it in: the distinguished person Mrs. Jordan was to
+marry would answer bells and put on coals and superintend, at least,
+the cleaning of boots for the other distinguished person whom she
+might—well, whom she might have had, if she had wished, so much more to
+say to. “Good-bye,” she added; “good-bye.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan, however, again taking her muff from her, turned it over,
+brushed it off and thoughtfully peeped into it. “Tell me this before
+you go. You spoke just now of your own changes. Do you mean that Mr.
+Mudge—?”
+
+“Mr. Mudge has had great patience with me—he has brought me at last to
+the point. We’re to be married next month and have a nice little home.
+But he’s only a grocer, you know”—the girl met her friend’s intent
+eyes—“so that I’m afraid that, with the set you’ve got into, you won’t
+see your way to keep up our friendship.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan for a moment made no answer to this; she only held the muff
+up to her face, after which she gave it back. “You don’t like it. I
+see, I see.”
+
+To her guest’s astonishment there were tears now in her eyes. “I don’t
+like what?” the girl asked.
+
+“Why my engagement. Only, with your great cleverness,” the poor lady
+quavered out, “you put it in your own way. I mean that you’ll cool off.
+You already _have_—!” And on this, the next instant, her tears began to
+flow. She succumbed to them and collapsed; she sank down again, burying
+her face and trying to smother her sobs.
+
+Her young friend stood there, still in some rigour, but taken much by
+surprise even if not yet fully moved to pity. “I don’t put anything in
+any ‘way,’ and I’m very glad you’re suited. Only, you know, you did put
+to _me_ so splendidly what, even for me, if I had listened to you, it
+might lead to.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan kept up a mild thin weak wail; then, drying her eyes, as
+feebly considered this reminder. “It has led to my not starving!” she
+faintly gasped.
+
+Our young lady, at this, dropped into the place beside her, and now, in
+a rush, the small silly misery was clear. She took her hand as a sign
+of pitying it, then, after another instant, confirmed this expression
+with a consoling kiss. They sat there together; they looked out, hand
+in hand, into the damp dusky shabby little room and into the future, of
+no such very different suggestion, at last accepted by each. There was
+no definite utterance, on either side, of Mr. Drake’s position in the
+great world, but the temporary collapse of his prospective bride threw
+all further necessary light; and what our heroine saw and felt for in
+the whole business was the vivid reflexion of her own dreams and
+delusions and her own return to reality. Reality, for the poor things
+they both were, could only be ugliness and obscurity, could never be
+the escape, the rise. She pressed her friend—she had tact enough for
+that—with no other personal question, brought on no need of further
+revelations, only just continued to hold and comfort her and to
+acknowledge by stiff little forbearances the common element in their
+fate. She felt indeed magnanimous in such matters; since if it was very
+well, for condolence or reassurance, to suppress just then invidious
+shrinkings, she yet by no means saw herself sitting down, as she might
+say, to the same table with Mr. Drake. There would luckily, to all
+appearance, be little question of tables; and the circumstance that, on
+their peculiar lines, her friend’s interests would still attach
+themselves to Mayfair flung over Chalk Farm the first radiance it had
+shown. Where was one’s pride and one’s passion when the real way to
+judge of one’s luck was by making not the wrong but the right
+comparison? Before she had again gathered herself to go she felt very
+small and cautious and thankful. “We shall have our own house,” she
+said, “and you must come very soon and let me show it you.”
+
+“_We_ shall have our own too,” Mrs. Jordan replied; “for, don’t you
+know? he makes it a condition that he sleeps out?”
+
+“A condition?”—the girl felt out of it.
+
+“For any new position. It was on that he parted with Lord Rye. His
+lordship can’t meet it. So Mr. Drake has given him up.”
+
+“And all for you?”—our young woman put it as cheerfully as possible.
+
+“For me and Lady Bradeen. Her ladyship’s too glad to get him at any
+price. Lord Rye, out of interest in us, has in fact quite _made_ her
+take him. So, as I tell you, he will have his own establishment.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan, in the elation of it, had begun to revive; but there was
+nevertheless between them rather a conscious pause—a pause in which
+neither visitor nor hostess brought out a hope or an invitation. It
+expressed in the last resort that, in spite of submission and sympathy,
+they could now after all only look at each other across the social
+gulf. They remained together as if it would be indeed their last
+chance, still sitting, though awkwardly, quite close, and feeling
+also—and this most unmistakeably—that there was one thing more to go
+into. By the time it came to the surface, moreover, our young friend
+had recognised the whole of the main truth, from which she even drew
+again a slight irritation. It was not the main truth perhaps that most
+signified; but after her momentary effort, her embarrassment and her
+tears Mrs. Jordan had begun to sound afresh—and even without
+speaking—the note of a social connexion. She hadn’t really let go of it
+that she was marrying into society. Well, it was a harmless
+compensation, and it was all the prospective bride of Mr. Mudge had to
+leave with her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+
+This young lady at last rose again, but she lingered before going. “And
+has Captain Everard nothing to say to it?”
+
+“To what, dear?”
+
+“Why, to such questions—the domestic arrangements, things in the
+house.”
+
+“How _can_ he, with any authority, when nothing in the house is his?”
+
+“Not his?” The girl wondered, perfectly conscious of the appearance she
+thus conferred on Mrs. Jordan of knowing, in comparison with herself,
+so tremendously much about it. Well, there were things she wanted so to
+get at that she was willing at last, though it hurt her, to pay for
+them with humiliation. “Why are they not his?”
+
+“Don’t you know, dear, that he has nothing?”
+
+“Nothing?” It was hard to see him in such a light, but Mrs. Jordan’s
+power to answer for it had a superiority that began, on the spot, to
+grow. “Isn’t he rich?”
+
+Mrs. Jordan looked immensely, looked both generally and particularly,
+informed. “It depends upon what you call—! Not at any rate in the least
+as _she_ is. What does he bring? Think what she has. And then, love,
+his debts.”
+
+“His debts?” His young friend was fairly betrayed into helpless
+innocence. She could struggle a little, but she had to let herself go;
+and if she had spoken frankly she would have said: “Do tell me, for I
+don’t know so much about him as _that_!” As she didn’t speak frankly
+she only said: “His debts are nothing—when she so adores him.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan began to fix her again, and now she saw that she must only
+take it all. That was what it had come to: his having sat with her
+there on the bench and under the trees in the summer darkness and put
+his hand on her, making her know what he would have said if permitted;
+his having returned to her afterwards, repeatedly, with supplicating
+eyes and a fever in his blood; and her having, on her side, hard and
+pedantic, helped by some miracle and with her impossible condition,
+only answered him, yet supplicating back, through the bars of the
+cage,—all simply that she might hear of him, now for ever lost, only
+through Mrs. Jordan, who touched him through Mr. Drake, who reached him
+through Lady Bradeen. “She adores him—but of course that wasn’t all
+there was about it.”
+
+The girl met her eyes a minute, then quite surrendered. “What was there
+else about it?”
+
+“Why, don’t you know?”—Mrs. Jordan was almost compassionate.
+
+Her interlocutress had, in the cage, sounded depths, but there was a
+suggestion here somehow of an abyss quite measureless. “Of course I
+know she would never let him alone.”
+
+“How _could_ she—fancy!—when he had so compromised her?”
+
+The most artless cry they had ever uttered broke, at this, from the
+younger pair of lips. “_Had_ he so—?”
+
+“Why, don’t you know the scandal?”
+
+Our heroine thought, recollected there was something, whatever it was,
+that she knew after all much more of than Mrs. Jordan. She saw him
+again as she had seen him come that morning to recover the telegram—she
+saw him as she had seen him leave the shop. She perched herself a
+moment on this. “Oh there was nothing public.”
+
+“Not exactly public—no. But there was an awful scare and an awful row.
+It was all on the very point of coming out. Something was
+lost—something was found.”
+
+“Ah yes,” the girl replied, smiling as if with the revival of a blurred
+memory; “something was found.”
+
+“It all got about—and there was a point at which Lord Bradeen had to
+act.”
+
+“Had to—yes. But he didn’t.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan was obliged to admit it. “No, he didn’t. And then, luckily
+for them, he died.”
+
+“I didn’t know about his death,” her companion said.
+
+“It was nine weeks ago, and most sudden. It has given them a prompt
+chance.”
+
+“To get married?”—this was a wonder—“within nine weeks?”
+
+“Oh not immediately, but—in all the circumstances—very quietly and, I
+assure you, very soon. Every preparation’s made. Above all she holds
+him.”
+
+“Oh yes, she holds him!” our young friend threw off. She had this
+before her again a minute; then she continued: “You mean through his
+having made her talked about?”
+
+“Yes, but not only that. She has still another pull.”
+
+“Another?”
+
+Mrs. Jordan hesitated. “Why, he was _in_ something.”
+
+Her comrade wondered. “In what?”
+
+“I don’t know. Something bad. As I tell you, something was found.”
+
+The girl stared. “Well?”
+
+“It would have been very bad for him. But, she helped him some way—she
+recovered it, got hold of it. It’s even said she stole it!”
+
+Our young woman considered afresh. “Why it was what was found that
+precisely saved him.”
+
+Mrs. Jordan, however, was positive. “I beg your pardon. I happen to
+know.”
+
+Her disciple faltered but an instant. “Do you mean through Mr. Drake?
+Do they tell _him_ these things?”
+
+“A good servant,” said Mrs. Jordan, now thoroughly superior and
+proportionately sententious, “doesn’t need to be told! Her ladyship
+saved—as a woman so often saves!—the man she loves.”
+
+This time our heroine took longer to recover herself, but she found a
+voice at last. “Ah well—of course I don’t know! The great thing was
+that he got off. They seem then, in a manner,” she added, “to have done
+a great deal for each other.”
+
+“Well, it’s she that has done most. She has him tight.”
+
+“I see, I see. Good-bye.” The women had already embraced, and this was
+not repeated; but Mrs. Jordan went down with her guest to the door of
+the house. Here again the younger lingered, reverting, though three or
+four other remarks had on the way passed between them, to Captain
+Everard and Lady Bradeen. “Did you mean just now that if she hadn’t
+saved him, as you call it, she wouldn’t hold him so tight?”
+
+“Well, I dare say.” Mrs. Jordan, on the doorstep, smiled with a
+reflexion that had come to her; she took one of her big bites of the
+brown gloom. “Men always dislike one when they’ve done one an injury.”
+
+“But what injury had he done her?”
+
+“The one I’ve mentioned. He _must_ marry her, you know.”
+
+“And didn’t he want to?”
+
+“Not before.”
+
+“Not before she recovered the telegram?”
+
+Mrs. Jordan was pulled up a little. “Was it a telegram?”
+
+The girl hesitated. “I thought you said so. I mean whatever it was.”
+
+“Yes, whatever it was, I don’t think she saw _that_.”
+
+“So she just nailed him?”
+
+“She just nailed him.” The departing friend was now at the bottom of
+the little flight of steps; the other was at the top, with a certain
+thickness of fog. “And when am I to think of you in your little
+home?—next month?” asked the voice from the top.
+
+“At the very latest. And when am I to think of you in yours?”
+
+“Oh even sooner. I feel, after so much talk with you about it, as if I
+were already there!” Then “_Good_-bye!” came out of the fog.
+
+“Good-_bye_!” went into it. Our young lady went into it also, in the
+opposed quarter, and presently, after a few sightless turns, came out
+on the Paddington canal. Distinguishing vaguely what the low parapet
+enclosed she stopped close to it and stood a while very intently, but
+perhaps still sightlessly, looking down on it. A policeman; while she
+remained, strolled past her; then, going his way a little further and
+half lost in the atmosphere, paused and watched her. But she was quite
+unaware—she was full of her thoughts. They were too numerous to find a
+place just here, but two of the number may at least be mentioned. One
+of these was that, decidedly, her little home must be not for next
+month, but for next week; the other, which came indeed as she resumed
+her walk and went her way, was that it was strange such a matter should
+be at last settled for her by Mr. Drake
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1144 ***