In the Cage | Page 4

much as she could manage when taken separate.
She had, none the less, to give her mind steadily to what Mr. Mudge
had again written her about, the idea of her applying for a transfer to an
office quite similar--she couldn't yet hope for a place in a bigger--under
the very roof where he was foreman, so that, dangled before her every
minute of the day, he should see her, as he called it, "hourly," and in a
part, the far N.W. district, where, with her mother, she would save on
their two rooms alone nearly three shillings. It would be far from
dazzling to exchange Mayfair for Chalk Farm, and it wore upon her
much that he could never drop a subject; still, it didn't wear as things
HAD worn, the worries of the early times of their great misery, her own,
her mother's and her elder sister's--the last of whom had succumbed to
all but absolute want when, as conscious and incredulous ladies,
suddenly bereft, betrayed, overwhelmed, they had slipped faster and
faster down the steep slope at the bottom of which she alone had
rebounded. Her mother had never rebounded any more at the bottom
than on the way; had only rumbled and grumbled down and down,
making, in respect of caps, topics and "habits," no effort
whatever--which simply meant smelling much of the time of whiskey.

CHAPTER II

It was always rather quiet at Cocker's while the contingent from Ladle's
and Thrupp's and all the other great places were at luncheon, or, as the
young men used vulgarly to say, while the animals were feeding. She
had forty minutes in advance of this to go home for her own dinner;
and when she came back and one of the young men took his turn there

was often half an hour during which she could pull out a bit of work or
a book--a book from the place where she borrowed novels, very greasy,
in fine print and all about fine folks, at a ha'penny a day. This sacred
pause was one of the numerous ways in which the establishment kept
its finger on the pulse of fashion and fell into the rhythm of the larger
life. It had something to do, one day, with the particular flare of
importance of an arriving customer, a lady whose meals were
apparently irregular, yet whom she was destined, she afterwards found,
not to forget. The girl was blasee; nothing could belong more, as she
perfectly knew, to the intense publicity of her profession; but she had a
whimsical mind and wonderful nerves; she was subject, in short, to
sudden flickers of antipathy and sympathy, red gleams in the grey,
fitful needs to notice and to "care," odd caprices of curiosity. She had a
friend who had invented a new career for women--that of being in and
out of people's houses to look after the flowers. Mrs. Jordan had a
manner of her own of sounding this allusion; "the flowers," on her lips,
were, in fantastic places, in happy homes, as usual as the coals or the
daily papers. She took charge of them, at any rate, in all the rooms, at
so much a month, and people were quickly finding out what it was to
make over this strange burden of the pampered to the widow of a
clergyman. The widow, on her side, dilating on the initiations thus
opened up to her, had been splendid to her young friend, over the way
she was made free of the greatest houses--the way, especially when she
did the dinner- tables, set out so often for twenty, she felt that a single
step more would transform her whole social position. On its being
asked of her then if she circulated only in a sort of tropical solitude,
with the upper servants for picturesque natives, and on her having to
assent to this glance at her limitations, she had found a reply to the
girl's invidious question. "You've no imagination, my dear!"--that was
because a door more than half open to the higher life couldn't be called
anything but a thin partition. Mrs. Jordan's imagination quite did away
with the thickness.
Our young lady had not taken up the charge, had dealt with it good-
humouredly, just because she knew so well what to think of it. It was at
once one of her most cherished complaints and most secret supports
that people didn't understand her, and it was accordingly a matter of
indifference to her that Mrs. Jordan shouldn't; even though Mrs. Jordan,

handed down from their early twilight of gentility and also the victim
of reverses, was the only member of her circle in whom she recognised
an equal. She was perfectly aware that her imaginative life was the life