In the Cage | Page 6

Perhaps these represented five different friends
who had asked her--all women, just as perhaps now Mary and Cissy, or
one or other of them, were wiring by deputy. Sometimes she put in too
much--too much of her own sense; sometimes she put in too little; and
in either case this often came round to her afterwards, for she had an
extraordinary way of keeping clues. When she noticed she noticed; that
was what it came to. There were days and days, there were weeks
sometimes, of vacancy. This arose often from Mr. Buckton's devilish
and successful subterfuges for keeping her at the sounder whenever it
looked as if anything might arouse; the sounder, which it was equally
his business to mind, being the innermost cell of captivity, a cage
within the cage, fenced oft from the rest by a frame of ground glass.
The counter- clerk would have played into her hands; but the
counter-clerk was really reduced to idiocy by the effect of his passion
for her. She flattered herself moreover, nobly, that with the unpleasant
conspicuity of this passion she would never have consented to be
obliged to him. The most she would ever do would be always to shove
off on him whenever she could the registration of letters, a job she
happened particularly to loathe. After the long stupors, at all events,
there almost always suddenly would come a sharp taste of something; it
was in her mouth before she knew it; it was in her mouth now.
To Cissy, to Mary, whichever it was, she found her curiosity going out
with a rush, a mute effusion that floated back to her, like a returning
tide, the living colour and splendour of the beautiful head, the light of
eyes that seemed to reflect such utterly other things than the mean
things actually before them; and, above all, the high curt consideration
of a manner that even at bad moments was a magnificent habit and of
the very essence of the innumerable things--her beauty, her birth, her
father and mother, her cousins and all her ancestors--that its possessor
couldn't have got rid of even had she wished. How did our obscure little
public servant know that for the lady of the telegrams this was a bad
moment? How did she guess all sorts of impossible things, such as,
almost on the very spot, the presence of drama at a critical stage and the
nature of the tie with the gentleman at the Hotel Brighton? More than

ever before it floated to her through the bars of the cage that this at last
was the high reality, the bristling truth that she had hitherto only
patched up and eked out--one of the creatures, in fine, in whom all the
conditions for happiness actually met, and who, in the air they made,
bloomed with an unwitting insolence. What came home to the girl was
the way the insolence was tempered by something that was equally a
part of the distinguished life, the custom of a flowerlike bend to the less
fortunate--a dropped fragrance, a mere quick breath, but which in fact
pervaded and lingered. The apparition was very young, but certainly
married, and our fatigued friend had a sufficient store of mythological
comparison to recognise the port of Juno. Marguerite might be "awful,"
but she knew how to dress a goddess.
Pearls and Spanish lace--she herself, with assurance, could see them,
and the "full length" too, and also red velvet bows, which, disposed on
the lace in a particular manner (she could have placed them with the
turn of a hand) were of course to adorn the front of a black brocade that
would be like a dress in a picture. However, neither Marguerite nor
Lady Agnes nor Haddon nor Fritz nor Gussy was what the wearer of
this garment had really come in for. She had come in for Everard--and
that was doubtless not his true name either. If our young lady had never
taken such jumps before it was simply that she had never before been
so affected. She went all the way. Mary and Cissy had been round
together, in their single superb person, to see him--he must live round
the corner; they had found that, in consequence of something they had
come, precisely, to make up for or to have another scene about, he had
gone off-- gone off just on purpose to make them feel it; on which they
had come together to Cocker's as to the nearest place; where they had
put in the three forms partly in order not to put in the one alone. The
two others in a manner, covered it, muffled it, passed it off. Oh yes, she
went all the way, and this was a specimen of how she