In the Cage E-book

                              1908
                          IN THE CAGE

                         by Henry James








      Electronically Enhanced Text by Richard D. Hathaway
Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)



                          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
could n'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 did n'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.



                       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 blasee; 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 could n'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 did n't
understand her, and it was accordingly a matter of
indifference to her that Mrs. Jordan should n'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 did n't kill it, it must
be strong indeed. Combinations of flowers and greenstuff
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 had n'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.



                       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, Hotel Brighton, Paris. Only
understand and believe. 22d 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 amuse; the sounder, which it
was equally his business to mind, being the innermost cell
of captivity, a cage within the cage, fenced off 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 could n'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 Hotel
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 flower-like 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.



                        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 rearranged;
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 evidently 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 Eaton 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 could n'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 Hotel 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 was n'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.



                        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.



                       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 did n'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."



                     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 does n't make any difference." Mrs. Jordan was not
philosophic; she was just evidently determined it SHOULD N'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 could n'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 might n'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 could n'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 did n't know was one thing;
but the correspondence of people she did had an aspect of
its own for her even when she could n'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!"



                         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: "Have n't you found
THAT out?" The homes of luxury then had n'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 does n'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
did n'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 was n'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 had n'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, did n'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?



                       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, would n'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 should n'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 had n'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 did n'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 Mrs. 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.



                        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
would n't believe what passes before my eyes."

  "Then why have you never told me? You did n't mention
anything before I left."

  "Oh I had n'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 would n'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 IS N'T all. It is n't a millionth part!" she replied
with some sharpness. "It's immense fun"- she HAD to
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 banknotes 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 could n'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 linked 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 could n'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. Was n'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 does n'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
would n't do what she thought he might; would n'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 could n't
have said what- that she humoured herself with calling,
without words, her relation with him.



                        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
had n'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, has n'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 
did n'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 does n'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 could n't, not even once or twice, touch with him on
any 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 could n'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 could n'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 at other places
and with other girls. But she would defy any other girl to
follow him as she followed. And though they were n'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 did n'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 should n't
wholly deprive her.

  Sometimes she almost felt that he could n'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 would n'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
was n'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.



                       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 splendid dizzy fate; the wild wind of his life blew him
straight before it. Did n'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 did n'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 could n'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 abjection 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!



                       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 business-like 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 his 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 did n't matter- was the
proof in the admirable face, in the sightless preoccupation
of its possessor, that the latter had n'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 sun-shot 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 did n'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,
Hotel 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. "Is n'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 should n't be the fault of her own grand
memory. Had n't it been settled weeks before?- for Miss
Dolman it was always to be "Cooper's."

  

                    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 far.

  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 a
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 did n'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.



                         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 shopgirl at large that she hugged the theory
she was n'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 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 did n't, in such
cases, matter- did n't count as infidelity, counted only as
something else: she might have been curious, since it came
to that, to see exactly as 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
did n'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 did n'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 is n'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 have n't had it?"

  "No indeed!"

  "Then you have n'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 would n't. She had known he would n'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 have n'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
shopgirl 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
is n'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.



                       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 was n'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 had
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 does n'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 my 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 's 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 did n'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. Did n't the place, the associations and
circumstances, perfectly make it sound what it was n't?
and was n'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 must n'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, was n'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.



                         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 was n'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 o