In the Cage | Page 8

with
absolute levity; yet if it was now flagrant that he did live close at hand--
at Park Chambers--and belonged supremely to the class that wired
everything, even their expensive feelings (so that, as he never wrote,
his correspondence cost him weekly pounds and pounds, and he might
be in and out five times a day) there was, all the same, involved in the
prospect, and by reason of its positive excess of light, a perverse
melancholy, a gratuitous misery. This was at once to give it a place in
an order of feelings on which I shall presently touch.
Meanwhile, for a month, he was very constant. Cissy, Mary, never
re-appeared with him; he was always either alone or accompanied only
by some gentleman who was lost in the blaze of his glory. There was

another sense, however--and indeed there was more than one--in which
she mostly found herself counting in the splendid creature with whom
she had originally connected him. He addressed this correspondent
neither as Mary nor as Cissy; but the girl was sure of whom it was, in
Eaten Square, that he was perpetually wiring to--and all so
irreproachably!--as Lady Bradeen. Lady Bradeen was Cissy, Lady
Bradeen was Mary, Lady Bradeen was the friend of Fritz and of Gussy,
the customer of Marguerite, and the close ally in short (as was ideally
right, only the girl had not yet found a descriptive term that was) of the
most magnificent of men. Nothing could equal the frequency and
variety of his communications to her ladyship but their extraordinary,
their abysmal propriety. It was just the talk--so profuse sometimes that
she wondered what was left for their real meetings--of the very happiest
people. Their real meetings must have been constant, for half of it was
appointments and allusions, all swimming in a sea of other allusions
still, tangled in a complexity of questions that gave a wondrous image
of their life. If Lady Bradeen was Juno it was all certainly Olympian. If
the girl, missing the answers, her ladyship's own outpourings, vainly
reflected that Cocker's should have been one of the bigger offices
where telegrams arrived as well as departed, there were yet ways in
which, on the whole, she pressed the romance closer by reason of the
very quantity of imagination it demanded and consumed. The days and
hours of this new friend, as she came to account him, were at all events
unrolled, and however much more she might have known she would
still have wished to go beyond. In fact she did go beyond; she went
quite far enough.
But she could none the less, even after a month, scarce have told if the
gentlemen who came in with him recurred or changed; and this in spite
of the fact that they too were always posting and wiring, smoking in her
face and signing or not signing. The gentlemen who came in with him
were nothing when he was there. They turned up alone at other
times--then only perhaps with a dim richness of reference. He himself,
absent as well as present, was all. He was very tall, very fair, and had,
in spite of his thick preoccupations, a good-humour that was exquisite,
particularly as it so often had the effect of keeping him on. He could
have reached over anybody, and anybody--no matter who--would have
let him; but he was so extraordinarily kind that he quite pathetically

waited, never waggling things at her out of his turn nor saying "Here!"
with horrid sharpness. He waited for pottering old ladies, for gaping
slaveys, for the perpetual Buttonses from Thrupp's; and the thing in all
this that she would have liked most unspeakably to put to the test was
the possibility of her having for him a personal identity that might in a
particular way appeal. There were moments when he actually struck her
as on her side, as arranging to help, to support, to spare her.
But such was the singular spirit of our young friend that she could
remind herself with a pang that when people had awfully good
manners--people of that class,--you 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