In the Cage | Page 7

often went. She
would know the hand again any time. It was as handsome and as
everything else as the woman herself. The woman herself had, on
learning his flight, pushed past Everard's servant and into his room; she
had written her missive at his table and with his pen. All this, every
inch of it, came in the waft that she blew through and left behind her,
the influence that, as I have said, lingered. And among the things the
girl was sure of, happily, was that she should see her again.

CHAPTER IV

She saw her in fact, and only ten days later; but this time not alone, and
that was exactly a part of the luck of it. Not unaware- -as how could her
observation have left her so?--of the possibilities through which it
could range, our young lady had ever since had in her mind a dozen
conflicting theories about Everard's type; as to which, the instant they
came into the place, she felt the point settled with a thump that seemed
somehow addressed straight to her heart. That organ literally beat faster
at the approach of the gentleman who was this time with Cissy, and
who, as seen from within the cage, became on the spot the happiest of
the happy circumstances with which her mind had invested the friend
of Fritz and Gussy. He was a very happy circumstance indeed as, with
his cigarette in his lips and his broken familiar talk caught by his
companion, he put down the half-dozen telegrams it would take them
together several minutes to dispatch. And here it occurred, oddly
enough, that if, shortly before the girl's interest in his companion had
sharpened her sense for the messages then transmitted, her immediate
vision of himself had the effect, while she counted his seventy words,
of preventing intelligibility. His words were mere numbers, they told
her nothing whatever; and after he had gone she was in possession of
no name, of no address, of no meaning, of nothing but a vague sweet
sound and an immense impression. He had been there but five minutes,
he had smoked in her face, and, busy with his telegrams, with the
tapping pencil and the conscious danger, the odious betrayal that would
come from a mistake, she had had no wandering glances nor
roundabout arts to spare. Yet she had taken him in; she knew
everything; she had made up her mind.
He had come back from Paris; everything was re-arranged; the pair
were again shoulder to shoulder in their high encounter with life, their
large and complicated game. The fine soundless pulse of this game was
in the air for our young woman while they remained in the shop. While
they remained? They remained all day; their presence continued and
abode with her, was in everything she did till nightfall, in the thousands

of other words she counted, she transmitted, in all the stamps she
detached and the letters she weighed and the change she gave, equally
unconscious and unerring in each of these particulars, and not, as the
run on the little office thickened with the afternoon hours, looking up at
a single ugly face in the long sequence, nor really hearing the stupid
questions that she patiently and perfectly answered. All patience was
possible now, all questions were stupid after his, all faces were ugly.
She had been sure she should see the lady again; and even now she
should perhaps, she should probably, see her often. But for him it was
totally different; she should never never see him. She wanted it too
much. There was a kind of wanting that helped--she had arrived, with
her rich experience, at that generalisation; and there was another kind
that was fatal. It was this time the fatal kind; it would prevent.
Well, she saw him the very next day, and on this second occasion it
was quite different; the sense of every syllable he paid for was fiercely
distinct; she indeed felt her progressive pencil, dabbing as if with a
quick caress the marks of his own, put life into every stroke. He was
there a long time--had not brought his forms filled out but worked them
off in a nook on the counter; and there were other people as well--a
changing pushing cluster, with every one to mind at once and endless
right change to make and information to produce. But she kept hold of
him throughout; she continued, for herself, in a relation with him as
close as that in which, behind the hated ground glass, Mr. Buckton
luckily continued with the sounder. This morning everything changed,
but rather to dreariness; she had to swallow the rebuff to her theory
about fatal desires, which she did without confusion and indeed