In the Cage ...........................................................................................................................................................1

Henry James .............................................................................................................................................1

It had occurred to her early that in her positionthat of a young person spending, in framed and wired

confinement, the life of a guineapig or a magpieshe should know a great many persons without their

recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more livelythough singularly rare and always,

even then, with opportunity still very much smotheredto 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 menthe other telegraphist and the counterclerk; to mind the "sounder," which was always

going, to dole out stamps and postalorders, 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

The barrier that divided the little postandtelegraphoffice 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 fivepound noteand 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 emblemsshe 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

sphereto a more commanding position, that is, though to a much lower neighbourhoodwould 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 similarshe couldn't yet hope for a place in a biggerunder the

very roof where he was foreman, so that, dangled before her every minute of the day, he should see her, as he

called it, "hourly," and in a part, the far N.W. district, where, with her mother, she would save on their two

rooms alone nearly three shillings. It would be far from dazzling to exchange Mayfair for Chalk Farm, and it

wore upon her much that he could never drop a subject; still, it didn't wear as things HAD worn, the worries

of the early times of their great misery, her own, her mother's and her elder sister'sthe 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 whateverwhich simply

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

booka 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

womenthat 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 housesthe way, especially

when she did the dinner tables, set out so often for twenty, she felt that a single step more would transform

her whole social position. On its being asked of her then if she circulated only in a sort of tropical solitude,

with the upper servants for picturesque natives, and on her having to assent to this glance at her limitations,

she had found a reply to the girl's invidious question. "You've no imagination, my dear!"that was because a

door more than half open to the higher life couldn't be called anything but a thin partition. Mrs. Jordan's

Our young lady had not taken up the charge, had dealt with it good humouredly, just because she knew so

well what to think of it. It was at once one of her most cherished complaints and most secret supports that

people didn't understand her, and it was accordingly a matter of indifference to her that Mrs. Jordan shouldn't;

even though Mrs. Jordan, handed down from their early twilight of gentility and also the victim of reverses,

was the only member of her circle in whom she recognised an equal. She was perfectly aware that her

imaginative life was the life in which she spent most of her time; and she would have been ready, had it been

at all worth while, to contend that, since her outward occupation didn't kill it, it must be strong indeed.

Combinations of flowers and 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 upmade 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

counterclerk, 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

reallyfor it came to thatmore 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 reasona reason she might

almost put forward for a policy of procrastination. It sounded silly, of course, as yet, to plead such a motive,

especially as the fascination of the place was after all a sort of torment. But she liked her torment; it was a

torment she should miss at Chalk Farm. She was ingenious and uncandid, therefore, about leaving the breadth

of London a little longer between herself and that austerity. If she hadn't quite the courage in short to say to

Mr. Mudge that her actual chance for a play of mind was worth any week the three shillings he desired to

help her to save, she yet saw something happen in the course of the month that in her heart of hearts at least

answered the subtle question. This was connected precisely with the appearance of the memorable lady.

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 tonight,

dining Haddon. Opera tomorrow, 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. 22nd to 26th, and certainly 8th and 9th.

Mary was very handsome, the handsomest woman, she felt in a moment, she had ever seenor perhaps it

was only Cissy. Perhaps it was both, for she had seen stranger things than thatladies 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 onenot long beforewho, without winking, sent off five over five different

signatures. Perhaps these represented five different friends who had asked herall women, just as perhaps

now Mary and Cissy, or one or other of them, were wiring by deputy. Sometimes she put in too muchtoo

much of her own sense; sometimes she put in too little; and in either case this often came round to her

afterwards, for she had an extraordinary way of keeping clues. When she noticed she noticed; that was what it

came to. There were days and days, there were weeks sometimes, of vacancy. This arose often from Mr.

Buckton's devilish and successful subterfuges for keeping her at the sounder whenever it looked as if

anything might arouse; the sounder, which it was equally his business to mind, being the innermost cell of

captivity, a cage within the cage, fenced oft from the rest by a frame of ground glass. The counter clerk

would have played into her hands; but the counterclerk 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

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 thingsher beauty, her birth, her father and mother, her cousins and all her

ancestorsthat its possessor couldn't have got rid of even had she wished. How did our obscure little public

servant know that for the lady of the telegrams this was a bad moment? How did she guess all sorts of

impossible things, such as, almost on the very spot, the presence of drama at a critical stage and the nature of

the tie with the gentleman at the 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

outone of the creatures, in fine, in whom all the conditions for happiness actually met, and who, in the air

they made, bloomed with an unwitting insolence. What came home to the girl was the way the insolence was

tempered by something that was equally a part of the distinguished life, the custom of a flowerlike bend to

the less fortunatea 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

Pearls and Spanish laceshe 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 Everardand 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 himhe

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

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 halfdozen 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

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 helpedshe had arrived, with her

rich experience, at that generalisation; and there was another kind that was fatal. It was this time the fatal

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 timehad not brought his forms

filled out but worked them off in a nook on the counter; and there were other people as wella 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 Chambersand belonged supremely to the class that wired everything, even their

expensive feelings (so that, as he never wrote, his correspondence cost him weekly pounds and pounds, and

he might be in and out five times a day) there was, all the same, involved in the prospect, and by reason of its

positive excess of light, a perverse melancholy, a gratuitous misery. This was at once to give it a place in an

Meanwhile, for a month, he was very constant. Cissy, Mary, never reappeared 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, howeverand indeed there was more than onein which she mostly found herself counting

in the splendid creature with whom she had originally connected him. He addressed this correspondent

neither as Mary nor as Cissy; but the girl was sure of whom it was, in Eaten Square, that he was perpetually

wiring toand 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 talkso profuse sometimes that she wondered what was left for their

real meetingsof 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

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 timesthen 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

goodhumour that was exquisite, particularly as it so often had the effect of keeping him on. He could have

reached over anybody, and anybodyno matter whowould 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 mannerspeople of that class,you couldn't tell. These manners were for

everybody, and it might be drearily unavailing for any poor particular body to be overworked and unusual.

What he did take for granted was all sorts of facility; and his high pleasantness, his relighting of cigarettes

while he waited, his unconscious bestowal of opportunities, of boons, of blessings, were all a part of his

splendid security, the instinct that told him there was nothing such an existence as his could ever lose by. He

was somehow all at once very bright and very grave, very young and immensely complete; and whatever he

was at any moment it was always as much as all the rest the mere bloom of his beatitude. He was sometimes

Everard, as he had been at the 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 happinesswhatever he was and probably whatever he wasn't. And his happiness was a

partit became so little by littleof something that, almost from the first of her being at Cocker's, had been

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 worldmusic. 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 holeandcorner 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 transmittedthe "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 loveaffairs 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,

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 passeda 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

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 shoppeople 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 thatduring the quarter of an hour before dinner in especialwas 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 associateof 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

"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 postagestamps. 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 wellnigh 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 inshe penetrated. There was not a house of the great kindand it was of

course only a question of those, real homes of luxuryin 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 learningshe 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 supereminent air. There were women in and out of Cocker's who were

quite nice and who yet didn't look well; whereas Mrs. Jordan looked well and yet, with her extraordinarily

protrusive teeth, was by no means quite nice. It would seem, mystifyingly, that it might really come from all

the greatness she could live with. It was fine to hear her talk so often of dinners of twenty and of her doing, as

she said, exactly as she liked with them. She spoke as if, for that matter, she invited the company. "They

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. "Wellthe people

"But does one personally KNOW them?" our young lady went on, since that was the way to speak. "I mean

"They're not so nice as you!" Mrs. Jordan charmingly cried. "But I SHALL see more and more of them."

"Why almost any day. Of course," Mrs. Jordan honestly added, "they're nearly always out."

"Oh that doesn't make any difference." Mrs. Jordan was not philosophic; she was just evidently determined it

SHOULDN'T make any. "They're awfully interested in my ideas, and it's inevitable they should meet me over

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.

There was something in our young lady that could still stay her from asking for a personal description of

these apparitions; that showed too starved a state. But while she considered she took in afresh the whole of

the clergyman's widow. Mrs. Jordan couldn't help her teeth, and her sleeves were a distinct rise in the world.

A thousand tulips at a shilling clearly took one further than a thousand words at a penny; and the betrothed of

Mr. Mudge, in whom the sense of the race for life was always acute, found herself wondering, with a twinge

of her easy jealousy, if it mightn't after all then, for HER also, be betterbetter than where she wasto

follow some such scent. Where she was was where Mr. Buckton's elbow could freely enter her right side and

the counterclerk's breathinghe had something the matter with his nosepervade her left ear. It was

something to fill an office under Government, and she knew but too well there were places commoner still

than Cocker's; but it needed no great range of taste to bring home to her the picture of servitude and

promiscuity she couldn't but offer to the eye of comparative freedom. She was so boxed up with her young

men, and anything like a margin so absent, that it needed more art than she should ever possess to pretend in

the least to compass, with any one in the nature of an acquaintancesay with Mrs. Jordan herself, flying in,

as it might happen, to wire sympathetically to Mrs. Bubban approach to a relation of elegant privacy. She

remembered the day when Mrs. Jordan HAD, in fact, by the greatest chance, come in with fiftythree words

for Lord Rye and a fivepound note to change. This had been the dramatic manner of their reuniontheir

mutual recognition was so great an event. The girl could at first only see her from the waist up, besides

making but little of her long telegram to his lordship. It was a strange whirligig that had converted the

clergyman's widow into such a specimen of the class that went beyond the sixpence.

Nothing of the occasion, all the more, had ever become dim; least of all the way that, as her recovered friend

looked up from counting, Mrs. Jordan had just blown, in explanation, through her teeth and through the bars

of the cage: "I DO flowers, you know." Our young woman had always, with her little finger crooked out, a

pretty movement for counting; and she had not forgotten the small secret advantage, a sharpness of triumph it

might even have been called, that fell upon her at this moment and avenged her for the incoherence of the

message, an unintelligible enumeration of numbers, colours, days, hours. The correspondence of people she

didn't know was one thing; but the correspondence of people she did had an aspect of its own for her even

when she couldn't understand it. The speech in which Mrs. Jordan had defined a position and announced a

profession was like a tinkle of bluebells; but for herself her one idea about flowers was that people had them

at funerals, and her present sole gleam of light was that lords probably had them most. When she watched, a

minute later, through the cage, the swing of her visitor's departing petticoats, she saw the sight from the waist

down; and when the counterclerk, 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 counterclerk, 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 counterclerk'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

Our young lady could be reminded by such a remark that she usually struck her friend as pretty. "Do THEY

"Oceans. And they're the most particular." Oh it was a wonderful world. "You should see Lord Rye's."

"Yes, and his letters. He writes me pages on pageswith the most adorable little drawings and plans. You

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."

"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 papersmamma has still The Morning Postand who

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 vicesthose things all pass before me."

This was a picture that could make a clergyman's widow not imperceptibly gasp; it was in intention moreover

something of a retort to the thousand tulips. "Their vices? Have they got vices?"

Our young critic even more overtly stared then with a touch of contempt in her amusement: "Haven't you

found THAT out?" The homes of luxury then hadn't so much to give. "I find out everything."

Mrs. Jordan, at bottom a very meek person, was visibly struck. "I see. You do 'have' them."

Mrs. Jordan after an instant recovered her superiority. "Noit doesn't lead to much." Her own initiations so

"In seeing them?" At this the girl suddenly let herself go. "I hate them. There's that charm!"

"Is that what you call Mrs. Bubb? Yesit comes to me; I've had Mrs. Bubb. I don't think she has been in

herself, but there are things her maid has brought. Well, my dear!"and the young person from Cocker's,

recalling these things and summing them up, seemed suddenly to have much to say. She didn't say it,

however; she checked it; she only brought out: "Her maid, who's horridSHE must have her!" Then she

Mrs. Jordan, turning it over, adopted at last the plan of treating it with a smile. She wished to be liberal.

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 voguethe rage she might call itthat had caught her up.

Without sympathyor without imagination, for it came back again to thathow should she get, for big

dinners, down the middle and toward the far corners at all? It wasn't the combinations, which were easily

managed: the strain was over the ineffable simplicities, those that the bachelors above all, and Lord Rye

perhaps most of any, threw offjust blew off like cigarettepuffs such sketches of. The betrothed of Mr.

Mudge at all events accepted the explanation, which had the effect, as almost any turn of their talk was now

apt to have, of bringing her round to the terrific question of that gentleman. She was tormented with the

desire to get out of Mrs. Jordan, on this subject, what she was sure was at the back of Mrs. Jordan's head; and

to get it out of her, queerly enough, if only to vent a certain irritation at it. She knew that what her friend

would already have risked if she hadn't been timid and tortuous was: "Give him upyes, give him up: you'll

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

calculationsmatter for brooding and dreaming, even for peeping out not quite hopelessly from behind the

windowcurtains of lonely lodgings. If she did the flowers for the bachelors, in short, didn't she expect that to

have consequences very different from such an outlook at Cocker's as she had pronounced wholly desperate?

There seemed in very truth something auspicious in the mixture of bachelors and flowers, though, when

looked hard in the eye, Mrs. Jordan was not quite prepared to say she had expected a positive proposal from

Lord Rye to pop out of it. Our young woman arrived at last, none the less, at a definite vision of what was in

her mind. This was a vivid foreknowledge that the betrothed of Mr. Mudge would, unless conciliated in

advance by a successful rescue, almost hate her on the day she should break a particular piece of news. How

could that unfortunate otherwise endure to hear of what, under the protection of Lady Ventnor, was after all

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

onesShakespeare, Thompson or some funny American thing; which, as it also happened that she hated

vulgar plays, gave him ground for what was almost the fondest of his approaches, the theory that their tastes

were, blissfully, just the same. He was for ever reminding her of that, rejoicing over it and being affectionate

and wise about it. There were times when she wondered how in the world she could "put up with" him, how

she could put up with any man so smugly unconscious of the immensity of her difference. It was just for this

difference that, if she was to be liked at all, she wanted to be liked, and if that was not the source of Mr.

Mudge's admiration, she asked herself what on earth COULD be? She was not different only at one point, she

was different all round; unless perhaps indeed in being practically human, which her mind just barely

recognised that he also was. She would have made tremendous concessions in other quarters: there was no

limit for instance to those she would have made to Captain Everard; but what I have named was the most she

was prepared to do for Mr. Mudge. It was because HE was different that, in the oddest way, she liked as well

as deplored him; which was after all a proof that the disparity, should they frankly recognise it, wouldn't

necessarily be fatal. She felt that, oleaginoustoo 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 postalorder 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 counterclerk had crouched within the cage, but Mr. Mudge had, with a

very quiet but very quick step round the counter, an air of masterful authority she shouldn't soon forget,

triumphantly interposed in the scrimmage, parted the combatants and shaken the delinquent in his skin. She

had been proud of him at that moment, and had felt that if their affair had not already been settled the

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 goodlooking, 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 suddenlyone Sunday afternoon on a penny chair in the Regent's

Parkbroke, for him, capriciously, bewilderingly, into an intimation of what it came to. He had naturally

pressed more and more on the point of her again placing herself where he could see her hourly, and for her to

recognise that she had as yet given him no sane reason for delay he had small need to describe himself as

unable to make out what she was up to. As if, with her absurd bad reasons, she could have begun to tell him!

Sometimes she thought it would be amusing to let him have them full in the face, for she felt she should die

of him unless she once in a while stupefied him; and sometimes she thought it would be disgusting and

perhaps even fatal. She liked him, however, to think her silly, for that gave her the margin which at the best

she would always require; and the only difficulty about this was that he hadn't enough imagination to oblige

her. It produced none the less something of the desired effectto leave him simply wondering why, over the

matter of their reunion, she didn't yield to his arguments. Then at last, simply as if by accident and out of

mere boredom on a day that was rather flat, she preposterously produced her own. "Well, wait a bit. Where I

am I still see things." And she talked to him even worse, if possible, than she had talked to Jordan.

Little by little, to her own stupefaction, she caught that he was trying to take it as she meant it and that he was

neither astonished nor angry. Oh the British tradesmanthis 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

"Don't be stupid. What I 'like' is just to loathe them. You wouldn't believe what passes before my eyes."

"Oh I hadn't got round to it then. It's the sort of thing you don't believe at first; you have to look round you a

bit and then you understand. You work into it more and more. Besides," the girl went on, "this is the time of

the year when the worst lot come up. They're simply packed together in those smart streets. Talk of the

numbers of the poor! What I can vouch for is the numbers of the rich! There are new ones every day, and

they seem to get richer and richer. Oh, they do come up!" she cried, imitating for her private recreationshe

She had to think a moment; then she found something. "From the 'spring meetings.' They bet tremendously."

"It ISN'T all. It isn'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 extremehe had

a horror of coarseness and attended a Wesleyan chapelthat 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 foreshowingsheaven knew whatof 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 discerniblewas 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 couldn't have formulated his theory of the matter,

but the exuberance of the aristocracy was the advantage of trade, and everything was knit together in a

richness of pattern that it was good to follow with one's fingertips. 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

What it came to therefore for Mr. Mudge was that all enjoyments were, as might be said, interrelated, 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 couldn't understand people's

hating what they liked or liking what they hated; above all it hurt him somewherefor he had his private

delicaciesto see anything BUT money made out of his betters. To be too enquiring, or in any other way too

free, at the expense of the gentry was vaguely wrong; the only thing that was distinctly right was to be

prosperous at any price. Wasn't it just because they were up there aloft that they were lucrative? He

concluded at any rate by saying to his young friend: "If it's improper for you to remain at Cocker's, then that

"Improper?"her smile became a prolonged boldness. "My dear boy, there's no one like you!"

"Well," she returned, "I can't give up my friends. I'm making even more than Mrs. Jordan."

"Oh you dear donkey!"and, regardless of all the Regent's Park, she patted his cheek. This was the sort of

moment at which she was absolutely tempted to tell him that she liked to be near Park Chambers. There was a

fascination in the idea of seeing if, on a mention of Captain Everard, he wouldn't do what she thought he

might; wouldn't weigh against the obvious objection the still more obvious advantage. The advantage of

course could only strike him at the best as rather fantastic; but it was always to the good to keep hold when

you HAD hold, and such an attitude would also after all involve a high tribute to her fidelity. Of one thing

she absolutely never doubted: Mr. Mudge believed in her with a belief ! She believed in herself too, for

that matter: if there was a thing in the world no one could charge her with it was being the kind of low

barmaid person who rinsed tumblers and bandied slang. But she forbore as yet to speak; she had not spoken

even to Mrs. Jordan; and the hush that on her lips surrounded the Captain's name maintained itself as a kind

of symbol of the success that, up to this time, had attended something or othershe couldn't have said

whatthat she humoured herself with calling, without words, her relation with him.

She would have admitted indeed that it consisted of little more than the fact that his absences, however

frequent and however long, always ended with his turning up again. It was nobody's business in the world but

her own if that fact continued to be enough for her. It was of course not enough just in itself; what it had

taken on to make it so was the extraordinary possession of the elements of his life that memory and attention

had at last given her. There came a day when this possession on the girl's part actually seemed to enjoy

between them, while their eyes met, a tacit recognition that was half a joke and half a deep solemnity. He

bade her good morning always now; he often quite raised his hat to her. He passed a remark when there was

time or room, and once she went so far as to say to him that she hadn't seen him for "ages." "Ages" was the

word she consciously and carefully, though a trifle tremulously used; "ages" was exactly what she meant. To

this he replied in terms doubtless less anxiously selected, but perhaps on that account not the less remarkable,

"Oh yes, hasn't it been awfully wet?" That was a specimen of their give and take; it fed her fancy that no form

of intercourse so transcendent and distilled had ever been established on earth. Everything, so far as they

chose to consider it so, might mean almost anything. The want of margin in the cage, when he peeped

through the bars, wholly ceased to be appreciable. It was a drawback only in superficial commerce. With

Captain Everard she had simply the margin of the universe. It may be imagined therefore how their unuttered

reference to all she knew about him could in this immensity play at its ease. Every time he handed in a

telegram it was an addition to her knowledge: what did his constant smile mean to mark if it didn't mean to

mark that? He never came into the place without saying to her in this manner: "Oh yes, you have me by this

time so completely at your mercy that it doesn't in the least matter what I give you now. You've become a

She had only two torments; the greatest of which was that she couldn't, not even once or twice, touch with

him on some individual fact. She would have given anything to have been able to allude to one of his friends

by name, to one of his engagements by date, to one of his difficulties by the solution. She would have given

almost as much for just the right chanceit would have to be tremendously rightto 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 ladytelegraphist,

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

moreovercheaply sarcastic peopleby 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 himways to

which of course she couldn't be at all sure he did real justice. Real justice was not of this world: she had had

too often to come back to that; yet, strangely, happiness was, and her traps had to be set for it in a manner to

keep them unperceived by Mr. Buckton and the counter clerk. The most she could hope for apart from the

question, which constantly flickered up and died down, of the divine chance of his consciously liking her,

would be that, without analysing it, he should arrive at a vague sense that Cocker's waswell, attractive;

easier, smoother, sociably brighter, slightly more picturesque, in short more propitious in general to his little

affairs, than any other establishment just thereabouts. She was quite aware that they couldn't be, in so huddled

a hole, particularly quick; but she found her account in the slownessshe certainly could bear it if HE could.

The great pang was that just thereabouts postoffices were so awfully thick. She was always seeing him in

imagination in other places and with other girls. But she would defy any other girl to follow him as she

followed. And though they weren't, for so many reasons, quick at Cocker's, she could hurry for him when,

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 friendshipthat consisted of an almost humorous treatment

of the look of some of his words. They would never perhaps have grown half so intimate if he had not, by the

blessing of heaven, formed some of his letters with a queerness! It was positive that the queerness could

scarce have been greater if he had practised it for the very purpose of bringing their heads together over it as

far as was possible to heads on different sides of a wire fence. It had taken her truly but once or twice to

master these tricks, but, at the cost of striking him perhaps as stupid, she could still challenge them when

circumstances favoured. The great circumstance that favoured was that she sometimes actually believed he

knew she only feigned perplexity. If he knew it therefore he tolerated it; if he tolerated it he came back; and if

he came back he liked her. This was her seventh heaven; and she didn't ask much of his likingshe 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 lets life; he had to travelthere 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 askedthat he shouldn't wholly deprive her.

Sometimes she almost felt that he couldn't have deprived her even had he been minded, by reason of the web

of revelation that was woven between them. She quite thrilled herself with thinking what, with such a lot of

material, a bad girl would do. It would be a scene better than many in her ha'penny novels, this going to him

in the dusk of evening at Park Chambers and letting him at last have it. "I know too much about a certain

person now not to put it to youexcuse my being so luridthat 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 againthe point of an

unreadiness to name, when it came to that, the purchasing medium. It wouldn't certainly be anything so gross

as money, and the matter accordingly remained rather vague, all the more that SHE was not a bad girl. It

wasn't for any such reason as might have aggravated a mere minx that she often hoped he would again bring

Cissy. The difficulty of this, however, was constantly present to her, for the kind of communion to which

Cocker's so richly ministered rested on the fact that Cissy and he were so often in different places. She knew

by this time all the placesSuchbury, 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

desirewhich her face must have expressedthat he should recognise her forbearance to criticise as one of

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 steamwheel. He was at any

rate in the strong grip of a dizzy splendid fate; the wild wind of his life blew him straight before it. Didn't she

catch in his face at times, even through his smile and his happy habit, the gleam of that pale glare with which

a bewildered victim appeals, as he passes, to some pair of pitying eyes? He perhaps didn't even himself know

how scared he was; but SHE knew. They were in danger, they were in danger, Captain Everard and Lady

Bradeen: it beat every novel in the shop. She thought of Mr. Mudge and his safe sentiment; she thought of

herself and blushed even more for her tepid response to it. It was a comfort to her at such moments to feel

that in another relationa relation supplying that affinity with her nature that Mr. Mudge, deluded creature,

would never supplyshe 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 counterclerk 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 heartbeats and that in

retrospect greatly quickened her blushes. One evening she had lingered late and watchedwatched 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 herCaptain 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 hopedsnug in bed; and at

the hour of her final departure he was of courseshe had such things all on her fingers'endsdressing for

dinner. We may let it pass that if she couldn't bring herself to hover till he was dressed, this was simply

because such a process for such a person could only be terribly prolonged. When she went in the middle of

the day to her own dinner she had too little time to do anything but go straight, though it must be added that

for a real certainty she would joyously have omitted the repast. She had made up her mind as to there being

on the whole no decent pretext to justify her flitting casually past at three o'clock in the morning. That was

the hour at which, if the ha'penny novels were not all wrong, he probably came home for the night. She was

therefore reduced to the vainest figuration of the miraculous meeting toward which a hundred impossibilities

would have to conspire. But if nothing was more impossible than the fact, nothing was more intense than the

vision. What may not, we can only moralise, take place in the quickened muffled perception of a young

person with an ardent soul? All our humble friend's native distinction, her refinement of personal grain, of

heredity, of pride, took refuge in this small throbbing spot; for when she was most conscious of the objection

of her vanity and the pitifulness of her little flutters and manoeuvres, then the consolation and the redemption

were most sure to glow before her in some just discernible sign. He did like her!

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

counterclerk in answer to her sharp question. Our young friend was busy with half a dozen people, but she

had dispatched them in her most businesslike manner by the time her ladyship flung through the bars this

light of reappearance. Then the directness with which the girl managed to receive the accompanying missive

was the result of the concentration that had caused her to make the stamps fly during the few minutes

occupied by the production of it. This concentration, in turn, may be described as the effect of the

apprehension of imminent relief. It was nineteen days, counted and checked off, since she had seen the object

of her homage; and as, had he been in London, she should, with his habits, have been sure to see him often,

she was now about to learn what other spot his presence might just then happen to sanctify. For she thought

of them, the other spots, as ecstatically conscious of it, expressively happy in it.

But, gracious, how handsome was her ladyship, and what an added price it gave him that the air of intimacy

he threw out should have flowed originally from such a source! The girl looked straight through the cage at

the eyes and lips that must so often have been so near as ownlooked at them with a strange passion that for

an instant had the result of filling out some of the gaps, supplying the missing answers, in his

correspondence. Then as she made out that the features she thus scanned and associated were totally unaware

of it, that they glowed only with the colour of quite other and not at all guessable thoughts, this directly added

to their splendour, gave the girl the sharpest impression she had yet received of the uplifted, the unattainable

plains of heaven, and yet at the same time caused her to thrill with a sense of the high company she did

somehow keep. She was with the absent through her ladyship and with her ladyship through the absent. The

only pang but it didn't matterwas the proof in the admirable face, in the sightless preoccupation of its

possessor, that the latter hadn't a notion of her. Her folly had gone to the point of half believing that the other

party to the affair must sometimes mention in Eaton Square the extraordinary little person at the place from

which he so often wired. Yet the perception of her visitor's blankness actually helped this extraordinary little

person, the next instant, to take refuge in a reflexion that could be as proud as it liked. "How little she knows,

how little she knows!" the girl cried to herself; for what did that show after all but that Captain Everard's

telegraphic confidant was Captain Everard's charming secret? Our young friend's perusal of her ladyship's

telegram was literally prolonged by a momentary daze: what swam between her and the words, making her

see them as through rippled shallow sunshot water, was the great, the perpetual flood of "How much I

knowhow much I know!" This produced a delay in her catching that, on the face, these words didn't give

her what she wanted, though she was prompt enough with her remembrance that her grasp was, half the time,

just of what was NOT on the face. "Miss Dolman, Parade Lodge, Parade Terrace, Dover. Let him instantly

know right one, Hotel de France, Ostend. Make it seven nine four nine six one. Wire me alternative

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 didthrew 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

"Yespaid." 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

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 counterclerk,

It was as if she had bodily leapedcleared the top of the cage and alighted on her interlocutress.

Our young friend fairly pitied her; she had made her in an instant so helpless, and yet not a bit haughty nor

"Yes, I know!" Our young friend smiled, meeting the other's eyes, and, having made Juno blush, proceeded to

patronise her. "I'LL do it"she put out a competent hand. Her ladyship only submitted, confused and

bewildered, all presence of mind quite gone; and the next moment the telegram was in the cage again and its

author out of the shop. Then quickly, boldly, under all the eyes that might have witnessed her tampering, the

extraordinary little person at Cocker's made the proper change. People were really too giddy, and if they

WERE, in a certain case, to be caught, it shouldn't be the fault of her own grand memory. Hadn't it been

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

knowingthey had made so many of their arrangements with her aidexactly 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,

Whitbytormented 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 herthe 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 Septemberno less than eleven daysfor 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 daycharacterising the whole business, from that moment, as their "plans," under which name he

handled it as a Syndicate handles a Chinese or other Loanhe 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 Jerseyfor he had great ideaswith all the mastery of

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, nonot tonight." 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 eightfifteen. Remarks were remarks, and very well for that; but fate was fate,

and this young lady's was to pass Park Chambers every night in the working week. Out of the immensity of

her knowledge of the life of the world there bloomed on these occasions as specific remembrance that it was

regarded in that region, in August and September, as rather pleasant just to be caught for something or other

in passing through town. Somebody was always passing and somebody might catch somebody else. It was in

full cognisance of this subtle law that she adhered to the most ridiculous circuit she could have made to get

home. One warm dull featureless Friday, when an accident had made her start from Cocker's a little later than

usual, she became aware that something of which the infinite possibilities had for so long peopled her dreams

was at last prodigiously upon her, though the perfection in which the conditions happened to present it was

almost rich enough to be but the positive creation of a dream. She saw, straight before her, like a vista painted

in a picture, the empty street and the lamps that burned pale in the dusk not yet established. It was into the

convenience of this quiet twilight that a gentleman on the doorstep of the Chambers gazed with a vagueness

that our young lady's little figure violently trembled, in the approach, with the measure of its power to

dissipate. Everything indeed grew in a flash terrific and distinct; her old uncertainties fell away from her, and,

since she was so familiar with fate, she felt as if the very nail that fixed it were driven in by the hard look

The vestibule was open behind him and the porter as absent as on the day she had peeped in; he had just

come outwas in town, in a tweed suit and a pot hat, but between two journeysduly 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 roada situation to which three or four steps of her own had unmistakeably

contributedand then passing not again to the side on which she had arrived, but back toward the portal of

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.

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 wasn't.

Yes, it was strange, she afterwards thought, that so much could have come and gone and yet not disfigured

the dear little intense crisis either with impertinence or with resentment, with any of the horrid notes of that

kind of acquaintance. He had taken no liberty, as she would have so called it; and, through not having to

betray the sense of one, she herself had, still more charmingly, taken none. On the spot, nevertheless, she

could speculate as to what it meant that, if his relation with Lady Bradeen continued to be what her mind had

built it up to, he should feel free to proceed with marked independence. This was one of the questions he was

to leave her to deal withthe question whether people of his sort still asked girls up to their rooms when

they were so awfully in love with other women. Could people of his sort do that without what people of her

sort would call being "false to their love"? She had already a vision of how the true answer was that people of

her sort didn't, in such cases, matterdidn't count as infidelity, counted only as something else: she might

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

itthey 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 himthe hope he would say nothing vulgar. She knew

thoroughly what she meant by that; she meant something quite apart from any matter of his being "false."

Their bench was not far within; it was near the Park Lane paling and the patchy lamplight and the rumbling

cabs and 'buses. A strange emotion had come to her, and she felt indeed excitement within excitement; above

all a conscious joy in testing him with chances he didn't take. She had an intense desire he should know the

type she really conformed to without her doing anything so low as tell him, and he had surely begun to know

it from the moment he didn't seize the opportunities into which a common man would promptly have

blundered. These were on the mere awkward surface, and THEIR relation was beautiful behind and below

them. She had questioned so little on the way what they might be doing that as soon as they were seated she

took straight hold of it. Her hours, her confinement, the many conditions of service in the postoffice,

hadwith a glance at his own postal resources and alternatives formed, up to this stage, the subject of

their talk. "Well, here we are, and it may be right enough; but this isn't the least, you know, where I was

He looked of a sudden so extravagantly concerned that she laughed out. "All day? Yes, we do feed once. But

"Oh deary ME!" he exclaimed with an intonation so droll and yet a touch so light and a distress so

markeda confession of helplessness for such a case, in short, so unrelievedthat she at once felt sure she

had made the great difference plain. He looked at her with the kindest eyes and still without saying what she

had known he wouldn't. She had known he wouldn't say "Then sup with ME!" but the proof of it made her

"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

"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 minutesthey would probably never come

backbe 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

"Yes; you can fancy I haven't many minutes to waste. There was a place tonight I had to stop at."

"I see, I see" he knew already so much about her work. "It must be an awful grindfor a lady."

"It is, but I don't think I groan over it any more than my companionsand 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

"If you had had another employment," he remarked after a moment, "we might never have become

"It's highly probableand 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 thatthat"with this she paused; it was not after all so easy to express"that anything you may have

"Oh I've thought a tremendous lot!" her companion laughed. "Do you mind my smoking?"

"No," she said as he lighted a cigarette, "that's just what it isn't. It's quite the same."

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 thingher headlong embarrassmentget

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.

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 thatit'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 uponthe sense of an intention in her poor zeal at Cocker's.

But any deficiency of this kind was no fault in him: he wasn't obliged to have an inferior clevernessto have

secondrate resources and virtues. It had been as if he almost really believed she had simply cried for fatigue,

and he accordingly put in some kind confused plea"You ought really to take something: won't you have

something or other SOMEWHERE?" to which she had made no response but a headshake of a sharpness that

"I mean meeting this wayonly this way. At my place thereTHAT 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

"Yes, ever so far awayto 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."

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 tonightnever, never again!here

it all is. I'll say it; I don't care what you think; it doesn't matter; I only want to help you. Besides, you're

kindyou're kind. I've been thinking then of leaving for ever so long. But you've come so oftenat

timesand you've had so much to do, and it has been so pleasant and interesting, that I've remained, I've

kept putting off any change. More than once, when I had nearly decided, you've turned up again and I've

thought 'Oh no!' That's the simple fact!" She had by this time got her confusion down so completely that she

could laugh. "This is what I meant when I said to you just now that I 'knew.' I've known perfectly that you

knew I took trouble for you; and that knowledge has been for me, and I seemed to see it was for you, as if

there were somethingI don't know what to call it!between us. I mean something unusual and good and

She had by this time, she could see, produced a great effect on him; but she would have spoken the truth to

herself had she at the same moment declared that she didn't in the least care: all the more that the effect must

be one of extreme perplexity. What, in it all, was visibly clear for him, none the less, was that he was

tremendously glad he had met her. She held him, and he was astonished at the force of it; he was intent,

immensely considerate. His elbow was on the back of the seat, and his head, with the pothat pushed quite

back, in a boyish way, so that she really saw almost for the first time his forehead and hair, rested on the hand

into which he had crumpled his gloves. "Yes," he assented, "it's not a bit horrid or vulgar."

She just hung fire a moment, then she brought out the whole truth. "I'd do anything for you. I'd do anything

for you." Never in her life had she known anything so high and fine as this, just letting him have it and

bravely and magnificently leaving it. Didn't the place, the associations and circumstances, perfectly make it

So she bravely and magnificently left it, and little by little she felt him take it up, take it down, as if they had

been on a satin sofa in a boudoir. She had never seen a boudoir, but there had been lots of boudoirs in the

telegrams. What she had said at all events sank into him, so that after a minute he simply made a movement

that had the result of placing his hand on her own presently indeed that of her feeling herself firmly

enough grasped. There was no pressure she need return, there was none she need decline; she just sat

admirably still, satisfied for the time with the surprise and bewilderment of the impression she made on him.

His agitation was even greater on the whole than she had at first allowed for. "I say, you know, you mustn't

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?"

"Why, wasn't that exactly what I dashed over from my door just now to thank you for?"

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

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 itmy 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 luxuriesyou 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

"Oh see here!" But he was highly amused. "Well, what then?" he enquired as if to humour her.

He threw back his head, laughing out; he was really exhilarated. "Oh yes, somehow!"

"Well, I think we each dodon'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

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

"Well, if I wasn't afraid you'd think I swagger, I should saythan anybody! If you leave your place there,

The tone of this was so still more serious that she had but her one acknowledgement. "I'd do anything for

youI'd do anything for you," she repeated. She had already, she felt, said it all; so what did anything more,

anything less, matter? That was the very reason indeed why she could, with a lighter note, ease him

generously of any awkwardness produced by solemnity, either his own or hers. "Of course it must be nice for

In immediate appreciation of this, however, he only smoked without looking at her. "But you don't want to

give up your present work?" he at last threw out. "I mean you WILL stay in the postoffice?"

"Rather! No one can touch you." With this he turned more to her again. "But you can get, with a move,

"I can get in the suburbs cheaper lodgings. I live with my mother. We need some space. There's a particular

He smoked and considered; seemed to stretch himself a little and, with his legs out, surrender himself

comfortably. "Well, well, wellI believe everything you say. I take it from youanything you likein the

most extraordinary way." It struck her certainly and almost without bitternessthat the way in which she

was already, as if she had been an old friend, arranging for him and preparing the only magnificence she

could muster, was quite the most extraordinary. "Don't, DON'T go!" he presently went on. "I shall miss you

"So that you just put it to me as a definite request?"oh how she tried to divest this of all sound of the

hardness of bargaining! That ought to have been easy enough, for what was she arranging to get? Before he

could answer she had continued: "To be perfectly fair I should tell you I recognise at Cocker's certain strong

"Those you allyou know the set I mean, YOUR setshow me with as good a conscience as if I had no

"Yes, how should they?" said the Captain sympathetically. "But isn't 'horrors' rather strong?"

"Your extravagance, your selfishness, your immorality, your crimes," she pursued, without heeding his

"I like them, as I tell youI revel in them. But we needn't go into that," she quietly went on; "for all I get out

of it is the harmless pleasure of knowing. I know, I know, I know!"she breathed it ever so gently.

She could enjoy his simplicity in silence, and for a moment she did so. "If I do stay because you want itand

I'm rather capable of thatthere are two or three things I think you ought to remember. One is, you know,

She was on the point, at this, of imitating with her hand his movement of shortly before; but she checked

herself, and there was no want of effect in her soothing substitute. "How can you? How can you?" He had,

too manifestly, only to look at it there, in the vulgarly animated gloom, to see that he couldn't; and at this

point, by the mere action of his silence, everything they had so definitely not named, the whole presence

round which they had been circling, became part of their reference, settled in solidly between them. It was as

if then for a minute they sat and saw it all in each other's eyes, saw so much that there was no need of a

pretext for sounding it at last. "Your danger, your danger!" Her voice indeed trembled with it, and she

During this moment he leaned back on the bench, meeting her in silence and with a face that grew more

strange. It grew so strange that after a further instant she got straight up. She stood there as if their talk were

now over, and he just sat and watched her. It was as if nowowing to the third person they had brought in

they must be more careful; so that the most he could finally say was: "That's where it is!"

"That's where it is!" the girl as guardedly replied. He sat still, and she added: "I won't give you up.

"I don't quite see my way, but I won't give you up," she repeated. "There. Goodbye."

It brought him with a jerk to his feet, tossing away his cigarette. His poor face was flushed. "See heresee

But that definitely settled it for her: this would, after all, be as bad as his asking her to supper. "You mustn't

"No, no; let me go." He looked almost as if she had struck him, but she didn't care; and the manner in which

she spokeit was literally as if she were angryhad the force of a command. "Stay where you are!"

"I won't give you up!" she cried once morethis time quite with passion; on which she got away from him

Mr. Mudge had lately been so occupied with their famous "plans" that he had neglected for a while the

question of her transfer; but down at Bournemouth, which had found itself selected as the field of their

recreation by a process consisting, it seemed, exclusively of innumerable pages of the neatest arithmetic in a

very greasy but most orderly little pocketbook, the distracting possible melted awaythe fleeting absolute

ruled the scene. The plans, hour by hour, were simply superseded, and it was much of a rest to the girl, as she

sat on the pier and overlooked the sea and the company, to see them evaporate in rosy fumes and to feel that

from moment to moment there was less left to cipher about. The week proves blissfully fine, and her mother,

at their lodgingspartly to her embarrassment and partly to her reliefstruck up with the landlady an

alliance that left the younger couple a great deal of freedom. This relative took her pleasure of a week at

Bournemouth in a stuffy backkitchen and endless talks; to that degree even that Mr. Mudge

himselfhabitually inclined indeed to a scrutiny of all mysteries and to seeing, as he sometimes admitted,

too much in thingsmade remarks on it as he sat on the cliff with his betrothed, or on the decks of steamers

that conveyed them, close packed items in terrific totals of enjoyment, to the Isle of Wight and the Dorset

He had a lodging in another house, where he had speedily learned the importance of keeping his eyes open,

and he made no secret of his suspecting that sinister mutual connivances might spring, under the roof of his

companions, from unnatural sociabilities. At the same time he fully recognised that as a source of anxiety, not

to say of expense, his future motherin law would have weighted them more by accompanying their steps

than by giving her hostess, in the interest of the tendency they considered that they never mentioned,

equivalent pledges as to the teacaddy and the jampot. These were the questionsthese indeed the familiar

commoditiesthat he had now to put into the scales; and his betrothed had in consequence, during her

holiday, the odd and yet pleasant and almost languid sense of an anticlimax. She had become conscious of an

extraordinary collapse, a surrender to stillness and to retrospect. She cared neither to walk nor to sail; it was

enough for her to sit on benches and wonder at the sea and taste the air and not be at Cocker's and not see the

counterclerk. She still seemed to wait for somethingsomething in the key of the immense discussions that

had mapped out their little week of idleness on the scale of a worldatlas. Something came at last, but

Preparation and precaution were, however, the natural flowers of Mr. Mudge's mind, and in proportion as

these things declined in one quarter they inevitably bloomed elsewhere. He could always, at the worst, have

on Tuesday the project of their taking the Swanage boat on Thursday, and on Thursday that of their ordering

minced kidneys on Saturday. He had moreover a constant gift of inexorable enquiry as to where and what

they should have gone and have done if they hadn't been exactly as they were. He had in short his resources,

and his mistress had never been so conscious of them; on the other hand they never interfered so little with

her own. She liked to be as she wasif it could only have lasted. She could accept even without bitterness a

rigour of economy so great that the little fee they paid for admission to the pier had to be balanced against

other delights. The people at Ladle's and at Thrupp's had THEIR ways of amusing themselves, whereas she

had to sit and hear Mr. Mudge talk of what he might do if he didn't take a bath, or of the bath he might take if

he only hadn't taken something else. He was always with her now, of course, always beside her; she saw him

more than "hourly," more than ever yet, more even than he had planned she should do at Chalk Farm. She

preferred to sit at the far end, away from the band and the crowd; as to which she had frequent differences

with her friend, who reminded her often that they could have only in the thick of it the sense of the money

they were getting back. That had little effect on her, for she got back her money by seeing many things, the

things of the past year, fall together and connect themselves, undergo the happy relegation that transforms

She liked having done with them, as she assured herself she had practically done, and the strange thing was

that she neither missed the procession now nor wished to keep her place for it. It had become there, in the sun

and the breeze and the seasmell, a far away story, a picture of another life. If Mr. Mudge himself liked

processions, liked them at Bournemouth and on the pier quite as much as at Chalk Farm or anywhere, she

learned after a little not to be worried by his perpetual counting of the figures that made them up. There were

dreadful women in particular, usually fat and in men's caps and write shoes, whom he could never let

alonenot that she cared; it was not the great world, the world of Cocker's and Ladle's and Thrupp's, but it

offered an endless field to his faculties of memory, philosophy, and frolic. She had never accepted him so

much, never arranged so successfully for making him chatter while she carried on secret conversations. This

separate commerce was with herself; and if they both practised a great thrift she had quite mastered that of

He was charmed with the panorama, not knowingor at any rate not at all showing that he knewwhat far

other images peopled her mind than the women in the navy caps and the shopboys in the blazers. His

observations on these types, his general interpretation of the show, brought home to her the prospect of Chalk

Farm. She wondered sometimes that he should have derived so little illumination, during his period, from the

society at Cocker's. But one evening while their holiday cloudlessly waned he gave her such a proof of his

quality as might have made her ashamed of her many suppressions. He brought out something that, in all his

overflow, he had been able to keep back till other matters were disposed of. It was the announcement that he

was at last ready to marrythat he saw his way. A rise at Chalk Farm had been offered him; he was to be

taken into the business, bringing with him a capital the estimation of which by other parties constituted the

handsomest recognition yet made of the head on his shoulders. Therefore their waiting was overit could be

a question of a near date. They would settle this date before going back, and he meanwhile had his eye on a

His having kept this great news for the last, having had such a card up his sleeve and not floated it out in the

current of his chatter and the luxury of their leisure, was one of those incalculable strokes by which he could

still affect her; the kind of thing that reminded her of the latent force that had ejected the drunken soldieran

example of the profundity of which his promotion was the proof. She listened a while in silence, on this

occasion, to the wafted strains of the music; she took it in as she had not quite done before that her future was

now constituted. Mr. Mudge was distinctly her fate; yet at this moment she turned her face quite away from

him, showing him so long a mere quarter of her cheek that she at last again heard his voice. He couldn't see a

pair of tears that were partly the reason of her delay to give him the assurance he required; but he expressed at

She was finally able to turn back. "Oh quite. There's nothing going on. No one comes but the Americans at

Thrupp's, and they don't do much. They don't seem to have a secret in the world."

"Then the extraordinary reason you've been giving me for holding on there has ceased to work?"

She thought a moment. "Yes, that one. I've seen the thing throughI've got them all in my pocket."

For a little again she made no answer. "No, not yet, all the same. I've still got a reasona different one."

He looked her all over as if it might have been something she kept in her mouth or her glove or under her

"I went out the other night and sat in the Park with a gentleman," she said at last.

Nothing was ever seen like his confidence in her and she wondered a little now why it didn't irritate her. It

only gave her ease and space, as she felt, for telling him the whole truth that no one knew. It had arrived at

present at her really wanting to do that, and yet to do it not in the least for Mr. Mudge, but altogether and only

for herself. This truth filled out for her there the whole experience about to relinquish, suffused and coloured

it as a picture that she should keep and that, describe it as she might, no one but herself would ever really see.

Moreover she had no desire whatever to make Mr. Mudge jealous; there would be no amusement in it, for the

amusement she had lately known had spoiled her for lower pleasures. There were even no materials for it.

The odd thing was how she never doubted that, properly handled, his passion was poisonable; what had

happened was that he had cannily selected a partner with no poison to distil. She read then and there that she

should never interest herself in anybody as to whom some other sentiment, some superior view, wouldn't be

sure to interfere for him with jealousy. "And what did you get out of that?" he asked with a concern that was

"Nothing but a good chance to promise him I wouldn't forsake him. He's one of my customers."

"Well, he won't. It's all right. But I must just keep on as long as he may want me."

"He may want me for thatbut I shan't. I rather liked it, but once, under the circumstances, is enough. I can

This was an ejaculation used also by Captain Everard, but oh with what a different sound! "You needn't

Mr. Mudge's immediate comment on this statement was to draw from his pocket a crumpled paper containing

the remains of half a pound of "sundries." These sundries had figured conspicuously in his prospective sketch

of their tour, but it was only at the end of three days that they had defined themselves unmistakeably as

chocolatecreams. "Have another?THAT one," he said. She had another, but not the one he indicated, and

Mr. Mudge considered an instant. "Then what did you go there for?" His tone was even slightly critical.

"I didn't quite know at the time. It was simply to be with him, I supposejust once. He's in danger, and I

wanted him to know I know it. It makes meeting himat Cocker's, since it's that I want to stay on formore

"It makes it mighty interesting for ME!" Mr. Mudge freely declared. "Yet he didn't follow you?" he asked. "I

"Yes, of course. That was the way you began, you know. You're awfully inferior to him."

"Well, my dear, you're not inferior to anybody. You've got a cheek! What's he in danger of?"

"Of being found out. He's in love with a ladyand it isn't right and I've found him out."

"Never mind what she has! They're in awful danger, but his is the worst, because he's in danger from her

"He's in a worse one. He's not only afraid of the ladyhe's afraid of other things."

Mr. Mudge selected another chocolatecream. "Well, I'm only afraid of one! But how in the world can you

The girl thought a moment; then she got up to walk. "He never heard of you," she replied.

Mr. Mudge, who had remained on the bench, looked up at her; she often preferred to be quiet when he

proposed to walk, but now that he seemed to wish to sit she had a desire to move. "But you haven't told me

Her lover, still on his seat, appealed to her in something of the attitude in which she had last left Captain

"You don't come in at all. That's just the beauty of it!"and with this she turned to mingle with the multitude

collected round the band. Mr. Mudge presently overtook her and drew her arm into his own with a quiet force

that expressed the serenity of possession; in consonance with which it was only when they parted for the

It was not till the end of October that she saw Captain Everard again, and on that occasionthe only one of

all the series on which hindrance had been so utterno communication with him proved possible. She had

made out even from the cage that it was a charming golden day: a patch of hazy autumn sunlight lay across

the sanded floor and also, higher up, quickened into brightness a row of ruddy bottled syrups. Work was slack

and the place in general empty; the town, as they said in the cage, had not waked up, and the feeling of the

day likened itself to something than in happier conditions she would have thought of romantically as Saint

Martin's summer. The counterclerk had gone to his dinner; she herself was busy with arrears of postal jobs,

in the midst of which she became aware that Captain Everard had apparently been in the shop a minute and

He had as usual half a dozen telegrams; and when he saw that she saw him and their eyes met he gave, on

bowing to her, an exaggerated laugh in which she read a new consciousness. It was a confession of

awkwardness; it seemed to tell her that of course he knew he ought better to have kept his head, ought to have

been clever enough to wait, on some pretext, till he should have found her free. Mr. Buckton was a long time

with him, and her attention was soon demanded by other visitors; so that nothing passed between them but

the fulness of their silence. The look she took from him was his greeting, and the other one a simple sign of

the eyes sent her before going out. The only token they exchanged therefore was his tacit assent to her wish

that since they couldn't attempt a certain frankness they should attempt nothing at all. This was her intense

preference; she could be as still and cold as any one when that was the sole solution.

Yet more than any contact hitherto achieved these counted instants struck her as marking a step: they were

built sojust in the mere flashon the recognition of his now definitely knowing what it was she would do

for him. The "anything, anything" she had uttered in the Park went to and fro between them and under the

pokedout china that interposed. It had all at last even put on the air of their not needing now clumsily to

manoeuvre to converse: their former little postal makebelieves, the intense implications of questions and

answers and change, had become in the light of the personal fact, of their having had their moment, a

possibility comparatively poor. It was as if they had met for all timeit exerted on their being in presence

again an influence so prodigious. When she watched herself, in the memory of that night, walk away from

him as if she were making an end, she found something too pitiful in the primness of such a gait. Hadn't she

precisely established on the part of each a consciousness that could end only with death?

It must be admitted that in spite of this brave margin an irritation, after he had gone, remained with her; a

sense that presently became one with a still sharper hatred of Mr. Buckton, who, on her friend's withdrawal,

had retired with the telegrams to the sounder and left her the other work. She knew indeed she should have a

chance to see them, when she would, on file; and she was divided, as the day went on, between the two

impressions of all that was lost and all that was reasserted. What beset her above all, and as she had almost

never known it before, was the desire to bound straight out, to overtake the autumn afternoon before it passed

away for ever and hurry off to the Park and perhaps be with him there again on a bench. It became for an

hour a fantastic vision with her that he might just have gone to sit and wait for her. She could almost hear

him, through the tick of the sounder, scatter with his stick, in his impatience, the fallen leaves of October.

Why should such a vision seize her at this particular moment with such a shake? There was a timefrom

Business quickened, it seemed, toward five, as if the town did wake up; she had therefore more to do, and she

went through it with little sharp stampings and jerkings: she made the crisp postal orders fairly snap while

she breathed to herself "It's the last daythe last day!" The last day of what? She couldn't have told. All she

knew now was that if she WERE out of the cage she wouldn't in the least have minded, this time, its not yet

being dark. She would have gone straight toward Park Chambers and have hung about there till no matter

when. She would have waited, stayed, rung, asked, have gone in, sat on the stairs. What the day was the last

of was probably, to her strained inner sense, the group of golden ones, of any occasion for seeing the hazy

sunshine slant at that angle into the smelly shop, of any range of chances for his wishing still to repeat to her

the two words she had in the Park scarcely let him bring out. "See heresee here!"the sound of these two

words had been with her perpetually; but it was in her ears today without mercy, with a loudness that grew

and grew. What was it they then expressed? what was it he had wanted her to see? She seemed, whatever it

was, perfectly to see it nowto see that if she should just chuck the whole thing, should have a great and

beautiful courage, he would somehow make everything up to her. When the clock struck five she was on the

very point of saying to Mr. Buckton that she was deadly ill and rapidly getting worse. This announcement

was on her lips, and she had quite composed the pale hard face she would offer him: "I can't stopI must go

home. If I feel better, later on, I'll come back. I'm very sorry, but I MUST go." At that instant Captain Everard

once more stood there, producing in her agitated spirit, by his real presence, the strangest, quickest

revolution. He stopped her off without knowing it, and by the time he had been a minute in the shop she felt

That was from the first minute how she thought of it. There were again other persons with whom she was

occupied, and again the situation could only be expressed by their silence. It was expressed, of a truth, in a

larger phrase than ever yet, for her eyes now spoke to him with a kind of supplication. "Be quiet, be quiet!"

they pleaded; and they saw his own reply: "I'll do whatever you say; I won't even look at yousee, see!"

They kept conveying thus, with the friendliest liberality, that they wouldn't look, quite positively wouldn't.

What she was to see was that he hovered at the other end of the counter, Mr. Buckton's end, and surrendered

himself again to that frustration. It quickly proved so great indeed that what she was to see further was how

he turned away before he was attended to, and hung off, waiting, smoking, looking about the shop; how he

went over to Mr. Cocker's own counter and appeared to price things, gave in fact presently two or three

orders and put down money, stood there a long time with his back to her, considerately abstaining from any

glance round to see if she were free. It at last came to pass in this way that he had remained in the shop longer

than she had ever yet known to do, and that, nevertheless, when he did turn about she could see him time

himselfshe was freshly taken upand cross straight to her postal subordinate, whom some one else had

released. He had in his hand all this while neither letters nor telegrams, and now that he was close to herfor

she was close to the counterclerkit brought her heart into her mouth merely to see him look at her

neighbour and open his lips. She was too nervous to bear it. He asked for a PostOffice Guide, and the young

man whipped out a new one; whereupon he said he wished not to purchase, but only to consult one a

moment; with which, the copy kept on loan being produced, he once more wandered off.

What was he doing to her? What did he want of her? Well, it was just the aggravation of his "See here!" She

felt at this moment strangely and portentously afraid of himhad in her ears the hum of a sense that, should

it come to that kind of tension, she must fly on the spot to Chalk Farm. Mixed with her dread and with her

reflexion was the idea that, if he wanted her so much as he seemed to show, it might be after all simply to do

for him the "anything" she had promised, the "everything" she had thought it so fine to bring out to Mr.

Mudge. He might want her to help him, might have some particular appeal; though indeed his manner didn't

denote thatdenoted on the contrary an embarrassment, an indecision, something of a desire not so much to

be helped as to be treated rather more nicely than she had treated him the other time. Yes, he considered quite

probably that he had help rather to offer than to ask for. Still, none the less, when he again saw her free he

continued to keep away from her; when he came back with his thumbed Guide it was Mr. Buckton he

After asking for the stamps he asked, quite as a second thought, for a postalorder for ten shillings. What did

he want with so many stamps when he wrote so few letters? How could he enclose a postalorder in a

telegram? She expected him, the next thing, to go into the corner and make up one of his telegramshalf a

dozen of themon purpose to prolong his presence. She had so completely stopped looking at him that she

could only guess his movements guess even where his eyes rested. Finally she saw him make a dash that

might have been toward the nook where the forms were hung; and at this she suddenly felt that she couldn't

keep it up. The counterclerk had just taken a telegram from a slavey, and, to give herself something to cover

her, she snatched it out of his hand. The gesture was so violent that he gave her in return an odd look, and she

also perceived that Mr. Buckton noticed it. The latter personage, with a quick stare at her, appeared for an

instant to wonder whether his snatching it in HIS turn mightn't be the thing she would least like, and she

anticipated this practical criticism by the frankest glare she had ever given him. It sufficed: this time it

It was repeated the next day; it went on for three days; and at the end of that time she knew what to think.

When, at the beginning, she had emerged from her temporary shelter Captain Everard had quitted the shop;

and he had not come again that evening, as it had struck her he possibly mightmight all the more easily

that there were numberless persons who came, morning and afternoon, numberless times, so that he wouldn't

necessarily have attracted attention. The second day it was different and yet on the whole worse. His access

to her had become possibleshe felt herself even reaping the fruit of her yesterday's glare at Mr. Buckton;

but transacting his business with him didn't simplifyit could, in spite of the rigour of circumstance, feed so

her new conviction. The rigour was tremendous, and his telegramsnot now mere pretexts for getting at

herwere apparently genuine; yet the conviction had taken but a night to develop. It could be simply enough

expressed; she had had the glimmer of it the day before in her idea that he needed no more help than she had

already given; that it was help he himself was prepared to render. He had come up to town but for three or

four days; he had been absolutely obliged to be absent after the other time; yet he would, now that he was

face to face with her, stay on as much longer as she liked. Little by little it was thus clarified, though from the

That was what the night before, at eight o'clock, her hour to go, had made her hang back and dawdle. She did

last things or pretended to do them; to be in the cage had suddenly become her safety, and she was literally

afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside. HE might be waiting; it was he who was her

alternate self, and of him she was afraid. The most extraordinary change had taken place in her from the

moment of her catching the impression he seemed to have returned on purpose to give her. Just before she

had done so, on that bewitched afternoon, she had seen herself approach without a scruple the porter at Park

Chambers; then as the effect of the rush of a consciousness quite altered she had on at last quitting Cocker's,

gone straight home for the first time since her return from Bournemouth. She had passed his door every night

for weeks, but nothing would have induced her to pass it now. This change was the tribute of her fearthe

result of a change in himself as to which she needed no more explanation than his mere face vividly gave her;

strange though it was to find an element of deterrence in the object that she regarded as the most beautiful in

the world. He had taken it from her in the Park that night that she wanted him not to propose to her to sup;

but he had put away the lesson by this timehe practically proposed supper every time he looked at her.

This was what, for that matter, mainly filled the three days. He came in twice on each of these, and it was as

if he came in to give her a chance to relent. That was after all, she said to herself in the intervals, the most that

he did. There were ways, she fully recognised, in which he spared her, and other particular ways as to which

she meant that her silence should be full to him of exquisite pleading. The most particular of all was his not

being outside, at the corner, when she quitted the place for the night. This he might so easily have beenso

easily if he hadn't been so nice. She continued to recognise in his forbearance the fruit of her dumb

supplication, and the only compensation he found for it was the harmless freedom of being able to appear to

say: "Yes, I'm in town only for three or four days, but, you know, I WOULD stay on." He struck her as

calling attention each day, each hour, to the rapid ebb of time; he exaggerated to the point of putting it that

There were other things still that he struck her as doing with a special intention; as to the most marked of

whichunless indeed it were the most obscureshe might well have marvelled that it didn't seem to her

more horrid. It was either the frenzy of her imagination or the disorder of his baffled passion that gave her

once or twice the vision of his putting down redundant money sovereigns not concerned with the little

payments he was perpetually makingso that she might give him some sign of helping him to slip them over

to her. What was most extraordinary in this impression was the amount of excuse that, with some

incoherence, she found for him. He wanted to pay her because there was nothing to pay her for. He wanted to

offer her things he knew she wouldn't take. He wanted to show her how much he respected her by giving her

the supreme chance to show HIM she was respectable. Over the dryest transactions, at any rate, their eyes had

out these questions. On the third day he put in a telegram that had evidently something of the same point as

the stray sovereignsa message that was in the first place concocted and that on a second thought he took

back from her before she had stamped it. He had given her time to read it and had only then bethought

himself that he had better not send it. If it was not to Lady Bradeen at Twindlewhere she knew her

ladyship then to bethis was because an address to Doctor Buzzard at Brickwood was just as good, with the

added merit of its not giving away quite so much a person whom he had still, after all, in a manner to

consider. It was of course most complicated, only half lighted; but there was, discernibly enough, a scheme of

communication in which Lady Bradeen at Twindle and Dr. Buzzard at Brickwood were, within limits, one

and the same person. The words he had shown her and then taken back consisted, at all events, of the brief

but vivid phrase "Absolutely impossible." The point was not that she should transmit it; the point was just

that she should see it. What was absolutely impossible was that before he had setted something at Cocker's he

The logic of this, in turn, for herself, was that she could lend herself to no settlement so long as she so

intensely knew. What she knew was that he was, almost under peril of life, clenched in a situation: therefore

how could she also know where a poor girl in the P.O. might really stand? It was more and more between

them that if he might convey to her he was free, with all the impossible locked away into a closed chapter, her

own case might become different for her, she might understand and meet him and listen. But he could convey

nothing of the sort, and he only fidgeted and floundered in his want of power. The chapter wasn't in the least

closed, not for the other party; and the other party had a pull, somehow and somewhere: this his whole

attitude and expression confessed, at the same time that they entreated her not to remember and not to mind.

So long as she did remember and did mind he could only circle about and go and come, doing futile things of

which he was ashamed. He was ashamed of his two words to Dr. Buzzard; he went out of the shop as soon as

he had crumpled up the paper again and thrust it into his pocket. It had been an abject little exposure of

dreadful impossible passion. He appeared in fact to be too ashamed to come back. He had once more left

town, and a first week elapsed, and a second. He had had naturally to return to the real mistress of his fate;

she had insistedshe knew how to insist, and he couldn't put in another hour. There was always a day when

she called time. It was known to our young friend moreover that he had now been dispatching telegrams from

other offices. She knew at last so much that she had quite lost her earlier sense of merely guessing. There

Eighteen days elapsed, and she had begun to think it probable she should never see him again. He too then

understood now: he had made out that she had secrets and reasons and impediments, that even a poor girl at

the P.O. might have her complications. With the charm she had cast on him lightened by distance he had

suffered a final delicacy to speak to him, had made up his mind that it would be only decent to let her alone.

Never so much as during these latter days had she felt the precariousness of their relationthe happy

beautiful untroubled original one, if it could only have been restoredin which the public servant and the

casual public only were concerned. It hung at the best by the merest silken thread, which was at the mercy of

any accident and might snap at any minute. She arrived by the end of the fortnight at the highest sense of

actual fitness, never doubting that her decision was now complete. She would just give him a few days more

to come back to her on a proper impersonal basisfor even to an embarrassing representative of the casual

public a public servant with a conscience did owe somethingand then would signify to Mr. Mudge that she

was ready for the little home. It had been visited, in the further talk she had had with him at Bournemouth,

from garret to cellar, and they had especially lingered, with their respectively darkened brows, before the

niche into which it was to be broached to her mother that she must find means to fit.

He had put it to her more definitely than before that his calculations had allowed for that dingy presence, and

he had thereby marked the greatest impression he had ever made on her. It was a stroke superior even again

to his handling of the drunken soldier. What she considered that in the face of it she hung on at Cocker's for

was something she could only have described as the common fairness of a last word. Her actual last word had

been, till it should be superseded, that she wouldn't forsake her other friend, and it stuck to her through thick

and thin that she was still at her post and on her honour. This other friend had shown so much beauty of

conduct already that he would surely after all just reappear long enough to relieve her, to give her something

she could take away. She saw it, caught it, at times, his parting present; and there were moments when she

felt herself sitting like a beggar with a hand held out to almsgiver who only fumbled. She hadn't taken the

sovereigns, but she WOULD take the penny. She heard, in imagination, on the counter, the ring of the

copper. "Don't put yourself out any longer," he would say, "for so bad a case. You've done all there is to be

done. I thank and acquit and release you. Our lives take us. I don't know muchthough I've really been

interestedabout yours, but I suppose you've got one. Mine at any rate will take MEand where it will.

Heighho! Good bye." And then once more, for the sweetest faintest flower of all: "Only, I saysee here!"

She had framed the whole picture with a squareness that included also the image of how again she would

decline to "see there," decline, as she might say, to see anywhere, see anything. Yet it befell that just in the

He came back one night with a rush, near the moment of their closing, and showed her a face so different and

new, so upset and anxious, that almost anything seemed to look out of it but clear recognition. He poked in a

telegram very much as if the simple sense of pressure, the distress of extreme haste, had blurred the

remembrance of where in particular he was. But as she met his eyes a light came; it broke indeed on the spot

into a positive conscious glare. That made up for everything, since it was an instant proclamation of the

celebrated "danger"; it seemed to pour things out in a flood. "Oh yes, here it isit's upon me at last! Forget,

for God's sake, my having worried or bored you, and just help me, just SAVE me, by getting this off without

the loss of a second!" Something grave had clearly occurred, a crisis declared itself. She recognised

immediately the person to whom the telegram was addressedthe Miss Dolman of Parade Lodge to whom

Lady Bradeen had wired, at Dover, on the last occasion, and whom she had then, with her recollection of

previous arrangements, fitted into a particular setting. Miss Dolman had figured before and not figured since,

but she was now the subject of an imperative appeal. "Absolutely necessary to see you. Take last train

Victoria if you can catch it. If not, earliest morning, and answer me direct either way."

"Reply paid?" said the girl. Mr. Buckton had just departed and the counterclerk was at the sounder. There

was no other representative of the public, and she had never yet, as it seemed to her, not even in the street or

She affixed the stamps in a flash. "She'll catch the train!" she then declared to him breathlessly, as if she

"I don't knowI hope so. It's awfully important. So kind of you. Awfully sharp, please." It was wonderfully

innocent now, his oblivion of all but his danger. Anything else that had ever passed between them was utterly

There was less of the same need therefore, happily, for herself; yet she only took time, before she flew to the

"Horrid, horridthere's a row!" But they parted, on it, in the next breath; and as she dashed at the sounder,

almost pushing, in her violence, the counterclerk off the stool, she caught the bang with which, at Cocker's

door, in his further precipitation, he closed the apron of the cab into which he had leaped. As he rebounded to

some other precaution suggested by his alarm, his appeal to Miss Dolman flashed straight away.

But she had not, on the morrow, been in the place five minutes before he was with her again, still more

discomposed and quite, now, as she said to herself, like a frightened child coming to its mother. Her

companions were there, and she felt it to be remarkable how, in the presence of his agitation, his mere scared

exposed nature, she suddenly ceased to mind. It came to her as it had never come to her before that with

absolute directness and assurance they might carry almost anything off. He had nothing to sendshe was

sure he had been wiring all overand yet his business was evidently huge. There was nothing but that in his

eyesnot a glimmer of reference or memory. He was almost haggard with anxiety and had clearly not slept

a wink. Her pity for him would have given her any courage, and she seemed to know at last why she had been

"One that was sent from here ever so long ago. There was something in it that has to be recovered. Something

He really spoke to her as if she had been some strange young woman at Knightsbridge or Paddington; but it

had no other effect on her than to give her the measure of his tremendous flurry. Then it was that, above all,

she felt how much she had missed in the gaps and blanks and absent answershow much she had had to

dispense with: it was now black darkness save for this little wild red flare. So much as that she saw, so much

her mind dealt with. One of the lovers was quaking somewhere out of town, and the other was quaking just

where he stood. This was vivid enough, and after an instant she knew it was all she wanted. She wanted no

detail, no factshe wanted no nearer vision of discovery or shame. "When was your telegram? Do you mean

"Oh yes, from hereseveral weeks ago. Five, six, seven"he was confused and impatient"don't you

"Remember?" she could scarcely keep out of her face, at the word, the strangest of smiles.

But the way he didn't catch what it meant was perhaps even stranger still. "I mean, don't you keep the old

She thought; she must do the young woman, and she knew exactly what the young woman would say and,

"Oh God, no! It was some time or other in Augusttoward the end. It was to the same address as the one I

"Oh!" said the girl, knowing at this the deepest thrill she had ever felt. It came to her there, with her eyes on

his face, that she held the whole thing in her hand, held it as she held her pencil, which might have broken at

that instant in her tightened grip. This made her feel like the very fountain of fate, but the emotion was such a

flood that she had to press it back with all her force. That was positively the reason, again, of her flutelike

Paddington tone. "You can't give us anything a little nearer?" Her "little" and her "us" came straight from

Paddington. These things were no false note for himhis difficulty absorbed them all. The eyes with which

he pressed her, and in the depths of which she read terror and rage and literal tears, were just the same he

"I don't know the date. I only know the thing went from here, and just about the time I speak of. It wasn't

She was as struck with the beauty of his plural pronoun as she had judged he might be with that of her own;

but she knew now so well what she was about that she could almost play with him and with her newborn

joy. "You say 'about the time you speak of.' But I don't think you speak of an exact timedo you?"

He looked splendidly helpless. "That's just what I want to find out. Don't you keep the old ones?can't you

Our young ladystill at Paddingtonturned the question over. "It wasn't delivered?"

"Yes, it WAS; yet, at the same time, don't you know? it wasn't." He just hung back, but he brought it out. "I

mean it was intercepted, don't you know? and there was something in it." He paused again and, as if to further

his quest and woo and supplicate success and recovery, even smiled with an effort at the agreeable that was

almost ghastly and that turned the knife in her tenderness. What must be the pain of it all, of the open gulf

and the throbbing fever, when this was the mere hot breath? "We want to get what was in itto know what it

"I seeI see." She managed just the accent they had at Paddington when they stared like dead fish. "And you

"Oh the last of August?" If she kept it up long enough she would make him really angry.

He visibly quivered, as with a gleam of hope; but it only poured oil on her quietude, and she was still

He blinked with a new uneasiness; it might have begun to come to him, through her difference, that he was

"So were youyou must do me that justice," she answered with a smile. "But let me see. Wasn't it Dover?"

"Exactlythank you so awfully much!" He began to hope again. "Then you HAVE itthe other one?"

"Yes; and she put in by mistake something wrong. That's what we've got to get hold of!" Heavens, what was

he going to say?flooding poor Paddington with wild betrayals! She couldn't too much, for her joy, dangle

him, yet she couldn't either, for his dignity, warn or control or check him. What she found herself doing was

"It fell into the wrong hands. But there's something in it," he continued to blurt out, "that MAY be all right.

That is, if it's wrong, don't you know? It's all right if it's wrong," he remarkably explained.

What WAS he, on earth, going to say? Mr. Buckton and the counter clerk were already interested; no one

would have the decency to come in; and she was divided between her particular terror for him and her general

curiosity. Yet she already saw with what brilliancy she could add, to carry the thing off, a little false

knowledge to all her real. "I quite understand," she said with benevolent, with almost patronising quickness.

"Forgotten most wretchedly, and it's an immense inconvenience. It has only just been found that it didn't get

"Yes, pleasethis very minute." The counter rang with his knuckles, with the knob of his stick, with his

She caught only the uncovered gleams that peeped out of the blackness, and she wondered what

complication, even among the most supposable, the very worst, could be bad enough to account for the

degree of his terror. There were twists and turns, there were places where the screw drew blood, that she

couldn't guess. She was more and more glad she didn't want to. "It has been sent on."

She gave him a smile that was meant to be, in the absolute irony of its propriety, quite divine. "It was August

She felt she scarce knew whatas if she might soon be pounced upon for some lurid connexion with a

scandal. It was the queerest of all sensations, for she had heard, she had read, of these things, and the wealth

of her intimacy with them at Cocker's might be supposed to have schooled and seasoned her. This particular

one that she had really quite lived with was, after all, an old story; yet what it had been before was dim and

distant beside the touch under which she now winced. Scandal?it had never been but a silly word. Now it

was a great tense surface, and the surface was somehow Captain Everard's wonderful face. Deep down in his

eyes a picture, a scenea great place like a chamber of justice, where, before a watching crowd, a poor girl,

exposed but heroic, swore with a quavering voice to a document, proved an ALIBI, supplied a link. In this

She considered, still holding him with her look, which she then turned on her two companions, who were by

this time unreservedly enlisted. She didn't carenot a scrap, and she glanced about for a piece of paper. With

this she had to recognise the rigour of official thrifta morsel of blackened blotter was the only loose paper

to be seen. "Have you got a card?" she said to her visitor. He was quite away from Paddington now, and the

next instant, pocketbook in hand, he had whipped a card out. She gave no glance at the name on itonly

turned it to the other side. She continued to hold him, she felt at present, as she had never held him; and her

command of her colleagues was for the moment not less marked. She wrote something on the back of the

He took the whole thing in with a flushed intensity; then there broke out in him a visibility of relief that was

simply a tremendous exposure. He shone at them all like a tall lighthouse, embracing even, for sympathy, the

blinking young men. "By all the powersit's WRONG!" And without another look, without a word of

thanks, without time for anything or anybody, he turned on them the broad back of his great stature,

She was left confronted with her habitual critics. "'If it's wrong it's all right!'" she extravagantly quoted to

No happiness she had ever known came within miles of it, and some minutes elapsed before she could recall

If life at Cocker's, with the dreadful drop of August, had lost something of its savour, she had not been slow

to infer that a heavier blight had fallen on the graceful industry of Mrs. Jordan.

With Lord Rye and Lady Ventnor and Mrs. Bubb all out of town, with the blinds down on all the homes of

luxury, this ingenious woman might well have found her wonderful taste left quite on her hands. She bore up,

however, in a way that began by exciting much of her young friend's esteem; they perhaps even more

frequently met as the wine of life flowed less free from other sources, and each, in the lack of better

diversion, carried on with more mystification for the other an intercourse that consisted not a little in peeping

out and drawing back. Each waited for the other to commit herself, each profusely curtained for the other the

limits of low horizons. Mrs. Jordan was indeed probably the more reckless skirmisher; nothing could exceed

her frequent incoherence unless it was indeed her occasional bursts of confidence. Her account of her private

affairs rose and fell like a flame in the windsometimes the bravest bonfire and sometimes a handful of

ashes. This our young woman took to be an effect of the position, at one moment and another, of the famous

door of the great world. She had been struck in one of her ha'penny volumes with the translation of a French

proverb according to which such a door, any door, had to be either open or shut; and it seemed part of the

precariousness of Mrs. Jordan's life that hers mostly managed to be neither. There had been occasions when it

appeared to gape widefairly to woo her across its threshold; there had been others, of an order distinctly

disconcerting, when it was all but banged in her face. On the whole, however, she had evidently not lost

heart; these still belonged to the class of things in spite of which she looked well. She intimated that the

profits of her trade had swollen so as to float her through any state of the tide, and she had, besides this, a

She rose superior, above all, on the happy fact that there were always gentlemen in town and that gentlemen

were her greatest admirers; gentlemen from the City in especialas to whom she was full of information

about the passion and pride excited in such breasts by the elements of her charming commerce. The City men

did in short go in for flowers. There was a certain type of awfully smart stockbrokerLord Rye called them

Jews and bounders, but she didn't carewhose extravagance, she more than once threw out, had really, if

one had any conscience, to be forcibly restrained. It was not perhaps a pure love of beauty: it was a matter of

vanity and a sign of business; they wished to crush their rivals, and that was one of their weapons. Mrs.

Jordan's shrewdness was extreme; she knew in any case her customershe dealt, as she said, with all sorts;

and it was at the worst a race for hera race even in the dull monthsfrom one set of chambers to another.

And then, after all, there were also still the ladies; the ladies of stockbroking circles were perpetually up and

down. They were not quite perhaps Mrs. Bubb or Lady Ventnor; but you couldn't tell the difference unless

you quarrelled with them, and then you knew it only by their makingup sooner. These ladies formed the

branch of her subject on which she most swayed in the breeze; to that degree that her confidant had ended

with an inference or two tending to banish regret for opportunities not embraced. There were indeed

teagowns that Mrs. Jordan describedbut teagowns were not the whole of respectability, and it was odd

that a clergyman's widow should sometimes speak as if she almost thought so. She came back, it was true,

unfailingly to Lord Rye, never, evidently, quite losing sight of him even on the longest excursions. That he

was kindness itself had become in fact the very moral it all pointedpointed in strange flashes of the poor

woman's nearsighted eyes. She launched at her young friend portentous looks, solemn heralds of some

extraordinary communication. The communication itself, from week to week, hung fire; but it was to the facts

over which it hovered that she owed her power of going on. "They are, in one way and another," she often

emphasised, "a tower of strength"; and as the allusion was to the aristocracy the girl could quite wonder why,

if they were so in "one way," they should require to be so in two. She thoroughly knew, however, how many

ways Mrs. Jordan counted in. It all meant simply that her fate was pressing her close. If that fate was to be

sealed at the matrimonial altar it was perhaps not remarkable that she shouldn't come all at once to the scratch

of overwhelming a mere telegraphist. It would necessarily present to such a person a prospect of regretful

sacrifice. Lord Ryeif it WAS Lord Ryewouldn't be "kind" to a nonentity of that sort, even though

One Sunday afternoon in November they went, by arrangement, to church together; after whichon the

inspiration of the moment the arrangement had not included itthey proceeded to Mrs. Jordan's lodging in

the region of Maida Vale. She had raved to her friend about her service of predilection; she was excessively

"high," and had more than once wished to introduce the girl to the same comfort and privilege. There was a

thick brown fog and Maida Vale tasted of acrid smoke; but they had been sitting among chants and incense

and wonderful music, during which, though the effect of such things on her mind was great, our young lady

had indulged in a series of reflexions but indirectly related to them. One of these was the result of Mrs.

Jordan's having said to her on the way, and with a certain fine significance, that Lord Rye had been for some

time in town. She had spoken as if it were a circumstance to which little required to be addedas if the

bearing of such an item on her life might easily be grasped. Perhaps it was the wonder of whether Lord Rye

wished to marry her that made her guest, with thoughts straying to that quarter, quite determine that some

other nuptials also should take place at Saint Julian's. Mr. Mudge was still an attendant at his Wesleyan

chapel, but this was the least of her worriesit had never even vexed her enough for her to so much as name

it to Mrs. Jordan. Mr. Mudge's form of worship was one of several thingsthey made up in superiority and

beauty for what they wanted in numberthat she had long ago settled he should take from her, and she had

now moreover for the first time definitely established her own. Its principal feature was that it was to be the

same as that of Mrs. Jordan and Lord Rye; which was indeed very much what she said to her hostess as they

sat together later on. The brown fog was in this hostess's little parlour, where it acted as a postponement of

the question of there being, besides, anything else than the teacups and a pewter pot and a very black little

fire and a paraffin lamp without a shade. There was at any rate no sign of a flower; it was not for herself Mrs.

Jordan gathered sweets. The girl waited till they had had a cup of teawaited for the announcement that she

fairly believed her friend had, this time, possessed herself of her formally at last to make; but nothing came,

after the interval, save a little poke at the fire, which was like the clearing of a throat for a speech.

"I think you must have heard me speak of Mr. Drake?" Mrs. Jordan had never looked so queer, nor her smile

Mrs. Jordan's "almost" had such an oddity that her companion was moved, rather flippantly perhaps, to take it

Again Mrs. Jordan pausedstill she looked queer. "Yes," she replied with a certain austerity; "that's exactly

what I'm about to give you rather a remarkable proof of." The sense of its being remarkable was already so

strong that, while she bridled a little, this held her auditor in a momentary muteness of submission. "Mr.

Drake has rendered his lordship for several years services that his lordship has highly appreciated and that

make it all the morea unexpected that they should, perhaps a little suddenly, separate."

"Separate?" Our young lady was mystified, but she tried to be interested; and she already saw that she had put

the saddle on the wrong horse. She had heard something of Mr. Drake, who was a member of his lordship's

circlethe member with whom, apparently, Mrs. Jordan's avocations had most happened to throw her. She

was only a little puzzled at the "separation." "Well, at any rate," she smiled, "if they separate as friends!"

"Oh his lordship takes the greatest interest in Mr. Drake's future. He'll do anything for him; he has in fact just

"No one knows it better than I," the girl said. She wished to draw her interlocutress out. "There will be

The ornament of that establishment waited a moment to answer, and then it was indirect. "Tell me what

Mrs. Jordan, on this, appeared to muse with embarrassed intensity. "I was always sure, yesand yet I often

Mrs. Jordan showed promptly enough that she loved for higher things. "Awfully handsomesix foot two.

"Quite like Mr. Mudge, then!" that gentleman's friend rather desperately exclaimed.

"Oh not quite!" Mr. Drake's was ambiguous about it, but the name of Mr. Mudge had evidently given her

some sort of stimulus. "He'll have more opportunity now, at any rate. He's going to Lady Bradeen."

The girl had seen, from the way Mrs. Jordan looked at her, that the effect of the name had been to make her

She floundered, but she found her feet. "Well, you'll remember I've often told you that if you've grand clients

"Yes," said Mrs. Jordan; "but the great difference is that you hate yours, whereas I really love mine. DO you

Mrs. Jordan's foolish eyes confessed, in fixing themselves on this sketch, to a degree of wonder and even of

envy. But she bore up and, with a certain gaiety, "Do you hate HER?" she demanded.

Her visitor's reply was prompt. "Dear no!not nearly so much as some of them. She's too outrageously

"Well, yes; deliciously." What was really delicious was Mrs. Jordan's vagueness. "You don't know

Jordan looked an instant as if she suspected her good faith, or at least her seriousness. "You know some

Mrs. Jordan continued to brood. "Well, I know some beauties." Then with her odd jerkiness: "Do you think

"Because that's not always the case with the goodlooking?"the other took it up. "No, indeed, it isn't: that's

one thing Cocker's has taught me. Still, there are some people who have everything. Lady Bradeen, at any

"A figure, a head of hair!" The girl made a little conscious motion that seemed to let the hair all down, and

Mrs. Jordan looked away from her nowlooked, she thought, rather injured and, as if trifled with, even a

little angry. The mention of Lady Bradeen had frustrated for a while the convergence of our heroine's

thoughts; but with this impression of her old friend's combined impatience and diffidence they began again to

whirl round her, and continued it till one of them appeared to dart at her, out of the dance, as if with a sharp

peck. It came to her with a lively shock, with a positive sting, that Mr. Drake wascould it be possible?

With the idea she found herself afresh on the edge of laughter, of a sudden and strange perversity of mirth.

Mr. Drake loomed, in a swift image, before her; such a figure as she had seen in open doorways of houses in

Cocker's quartermajestic, middle aged, erect, flanked on either side by a footman and taking the name of

a visitor. Mr. Drake then verily WAS a person who opened the door! Before she had time, however, to

recover from the effect of her evocation, she was offered a vision which quite engulfed it. It was

communicated to her somehow that the face with which she had seen it rise prompted Mrs. Jordan to dash, a

bit wildly, at something, at anything, that might attenuate criticism. "Lady Bradeen's rearrangingshe's

Mrs. Jordan gathered herself. "Then you haven't even heard of Lord Bradeen's death?"

Her comrade, unable for a moment to speak, gave a slow headshake. "You know it from Mr. Drake?" It was

"And he tells YOUI see." Our young lady got up; recovering her muff and her gloves she smiled. "Well, I

haven't unfortunately any Mr. Drake. I congratulate you with all my heart. Even without your sort of

assistance, however, there's a trifle here and there that I do pick up. I gather that if she's to marry any one it

The girl considered, drawing on a glove. "I saw, at one time, an immense deal of him."

Mrs. Jordan looked hard at the glove, but she hadn't after all waited for that to be sorry it wasn't cleaner.

"It must have been the time you were seeing so much of Mr. Drake." She had now fairly taken it in: the

distinguished person Mrs. Jordan was to marry would answer bells and put on coals and superintend, at least,

the cleaning of boots for the other distinguished person whom she mightwell, whom she might have had, if

Mrs. Jordan, however, again taking her muff from her, turned it over, brushed it off and thoughtfully peeped

into it. "Tell me this before you go. You spoke just now of your own changes. Do you mean that Mr.

"Mr. Mudge has had great patience with mehe has brought me at last to the point. We're to be married next

month and have a nice little home. But he's only a grocer, you know"the girl met her friend's intent

eyes"so that I'm afraid that, with the set you've got into, you won't see your way to keep up our

Mrs. Jordan for a moment made no answer to this; she only held the muff up to her face, after which she gave

To her guest's astonishment there were tears now in her eyes. "I don't like what?" the girl asked.

"Why my engagement. Only, with your great cleverness," the poor lady quavered out, "you put it in your own

way. I mean that you'll cool off. You already have!" And on this, the next instant, her tears began to flow.

She succumbed to them and collapsed; she sank down again, burying her face and trying to smother her sobs.

Her young friend stood there, still in some rigour, but taken much by surprise even if not yet fully moved to

pity. "I don't put anything in any 'way,' and I'm very glad you're suited. Only, you know, you did put to me so

Mrs. Jordan kept up a mild thin weak wail; then, drying her eyes, as feebly considered this reminder. "It has

Our young lady, at this, dropped into the place beside her, and now, in a rush, the small silly misery was

clear. She took her hand as a sign of pitying it, then, after another instant, confirmed this expression with a

consoling kiss. They sat there together; they looked out, hand in hand, into the damp dusky shabby little room

and into the future, of no such very different suggestion, at last accepted by each. There was no definite

utterance, on either side, of Mr. Drake's position in the great world, but the temporary collapse of his

prospective bride threw all further necessary light; and what our heroine saw and felt for in the whole

business was the vivid reflexion of her own dreams and delusions and her own return to reality. Reality, for

the poor things they both were, could only be ugliness and obscurity, could never be the escape, the rise. She

pressed her friendshe had tact enough for thatwith no other personal question, brought on no need of

further revelations, only just continued to hold and comfort her and to acknowledge by stiff little forbearances

the common element in their fate. She felt indeed magnanimous in such matters; since if it was very well, for

condolence or reassurance, to suppress just then invidious shrinkings, she yet by no means saw herself sitting

down, as she might say, to the same table with Mr. Drake. There would luckily, to all appearance, be little

question of tables; and the circumstance that, on their peculiar lines, her friend's interests would still attach

themselves to Mayfair flung over Chalk Farm the first radiance it had shown. Where was one's pride and

one's passion when the real way to judge of one's luck was by making not the wrong but the right

comparison? Before she had again gathered herself to go she felt very small and cautious and thankful. "We

shall have our own house," she said, "and you must come very soon and let me show it you."

"WE shall have our own too," Mrs. Jordan replied; "for, don't you know? he makes it a condition that he

"For any new position. It was on that he parted with Lord Rye. His lordship can't meet it. So Mr. Drake has

"For me and Lady Bradeen. Her ladyship's too glad to get him at any price. Lord Rye, out of interest in us,

has in fact quite MADE her take him. So, as I tell you, he will have his own establishment."

Mrs. Jordan, in the elation of it, had begun to revive; but there was nevertheless between them rather a

conscious pausea pause in which neither visitor nor hostess brought out a hope or an invitation. It

expressed in the last resort that, in spite of submission and sympathy, they could now after all only look at

each other across the social gulf. They remained together as if it would be indeed their last chance, still

sitting, though awkwardly, quite close, and feeling alsoand this most unmistakeablythat there was one

thing more to go into. By the time it came to the surface, moreover, our young friend had recognised the

whole of the main truth, from which she even drew again a slight irritation. It was not the main truth perhaps

that most signified; but after her momentary effort, her embarrassment and her tears Mrs. Jordan had begun to

sound afreshand even without speakingthe note of a social connexion. She hadn't really let go of it that

she was marrying into society. Well, it was a harmless compensation, and it was all the prospective bride of

This young lady at last rose again, but she lingered before going. "And has Captain Everard nothing to say to

"Not his?" The girl wondered, perfectly conscious of the appearance she thus conferred on Mrs. Jordan of

knowing, in comparison with herself, so tremendously much about it. Well, there were things she wanted so

to get at that she was willing at last, though it hurt her, to pay for them with humiliation. "Why are they not

"Nothing?" It was hard to see him in such a light, but Mrs. Jordan's power to answer for it had a superiority

Mrs. Jordan looked immensely, looked both generally and particularly, informed. "It depends upon what you

call! Not at any rate in the least as she is. What does he bring? Think what she has. And then, love, his

"His debts?" His young friend was fairly betrayed into helpless innocence. She could struggle a little, but she

had to let herself go; and if she had spoken frankly she would have said: "Do tell me, for I don't know so

much about him as THAT!" As she didn't speak frankly she only said: "His debts are nothingwhen she so

Mrs. Jordan began to fix her again, and now she saw that she must only take it all. That was what it had come

to: his having sat with her there on the bench and under the trees in the summer darkness and put his hand on

her, making her know what he would have said if permitted; his having returned to her afterwards,

repeatedly, with supplicating eyes and a fever in his blood; and her having, on her side, hard and pedantic,

helped by some miracle and with her impossible condition, only answered him, yet supplicating back,

through the bars of the cage,all simply that she might hear of him, now for ever lost, only through Mrs.

Jordan, who touched him through Mr. Drake, who reached him through Lady Bradeen. "She adores himbut

The girl met her eyes a minute, then quite surrendered. "What was there else about it?"

Her interlocutress had, in the cage, sounded depths, but there was a suggestion here somehow of an abyss

The most artless cry they had ever uttered broke, at this, from the younger pair of lips. "HAD he so?"

Our heroine thought, recollected there was something, whatever it was, that she knew after all much more of

than Mrs. Jordan. She saw him again as she had seen him come that morning to recover the telegramshe

saw him as she had seen him leave the shop. She perched herself a moment on this. "Oh there was nothing

"Not exactly publicno. But there was an awful scare and an awful row. It was all on the very point of

"Ah yes," the girl replied, smiling as if with the revival of a blurred memory; "something was found."

Mrs. Jordan was obliged to admit it. "No, he didn't. And then, luckily for them, he died."

"Oh not immediately, butin all the circumstancesvery quietly and, I assure you, very soon. Every

"Oh yes, she holds him!" our young friend threw off. She had this before her again a minute; then she

"It would have been very bad for him. But, she helped him some wayshe recovered it, got hold of it. It's

Our young woman considered afresh. "Why it was what was found that precisely saved him."

Her disciple faltered but an instant. "Do you mean through Mr. Drake? Do they tell him these things?"

"A good servant," said Mrs. Jordan, now thoroughly superior and proportionately sententious, "doesn't need

This time our heroine took longer to recover herself, but she found a voice at last. "Ah wellof course I

don't know! The great thing was that he got off. They seem then, in a manner," she added, "to have done a

"I see, I see. Goodbye." The women had already embraced, and this was not repeated; but Mrs. Jordan went

down with her guest to the door of the house. Here again the younger lingered, reverting, though three or four

other remarks had on the way passed between them, to Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen. "Did you mean

just now that if she hadn't saved him, as you call it, she wouldn't hold him so tight?"

"Well, I dare say." Mrs. Jordan, on the doorstep, smiled with a reflexion that had come to her; she took one of

her big bites of the brown gloom. "Men always dislike one when they've done one an injury."

"She just nailed him." The departing friend was now at the bottom of the little flight of steps; the other was at

the top, with a certain thickness of fog. "And when am I to think of you in your little home?next month?"

"Oh even sooner. I feel, after so much talk with you about it, as if I were already there!" Then "GOODbye!"

"GoodBYE!" went into it. Our young lady went into it also, in the opposed quarter, and presently, after a

few sightless turns, came out on the Paddington canal. Distinguishing vaguely what the low parapet enclosed

she stopped close to it and stood a while very intently, but perhaps still sightlessly, looking down on it. A

policeman; while she remained, strolled past her; then, going his way a little further and half lost in the

atmosphere, paused and watched her. But she was quite unawareshe was full of her thoughts. They were

too numerous to find a place just here, but two of the number may at least be mentioned. One of these was

that, decidedly, her little home must be not for next month, but for next week; the other, which came indeed

as she resumed her walk and went her way, was that it was strange such a matter should be at last settled for