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
shop-people 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 that—during the
quarter of an hour before dinner in especial—was 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 associate—of 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 it—because you _are_ one. Then we
_should_ win. Therefore just come in with me.”
“And leave the P.O.?”
“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 postage-stamps. 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 well-nigh 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 in—she penetrated. There was not a house of the great kind—and
it was of course only a question of those, real homes of luxury—in
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 learning—she 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 super-eminent 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
simply give me the table—all the rest, all the other effects, come
afterwards.”