The girl had in course of time every opportunity to inspect these
documents, and they a little disappointed her; but in the mean while
there had been more talk, and it had led to her saying, as if her
friend’s guarantee of a life of elegance were not quite definite:
“Well, I see every one at _my_ place.”
“Every one?”
“Lots of swells. They flock. They live, you know, all round, and the
place is filled with all the smart people, all the fast people, those
whose names are in the papers—mamma has still The _Morning Post_—and
who come up for the season.”
Mrs. Jordan took this in with complete intelligence. “Yes, and I dare
say it’s some of your people that _I_ do.”
Her companion assented, but discriminated. “I doubt if you ‘do’ them as
much as I! Their affairs, their appointments and arrangements, their
little games and secrets and vices—those things all pass before me.”
This was a picture that could make a clergyman’s widow not
imperceptibly gasp; it was in intention moreover something of a retort
to the thousand tulips. “Their vices? Have they got vices?”
Our young critic even more overtly stared then with a touch of contempt
in her amusement: “Haven’t you found _that_ out?” The homes of luxury
then hadn’t so much to give. “_I_ find out everything.”
Mrs. Jordan, at bottom a very meek person, was visibly struck. “I see.
You do ‘have’ them.”
“Oh I don’t care! Much good it does me!”
Mrs. Jordan after an instant recovered her superiority. “No—it doesn’t
lead to much.” Her own initiations so clearly did. Still—after all; and
she was not jealous: “There must be a charm.”
“In seeing them?” At this the girl suddenly let herself go. “I hate
them. There’s that charm!”
Mrs. Jordan gaped again. “The _real_ ‘smarts’?”
“Is that what you call Mrs. Bubb? Yes—it comes to me; I’ve had Mrs.
Bubb. I don’t think she has been in herself, but there are things her
maid has brought. Well, my dear!”—and the young person from Cocker’s,
recalling these things and summing them up, seemed suddenly to have
much to say. She didn’t say it, however; she checked it; she only
brought out: “Her maid, who’s horrid—_she_ must have her!” Then she
went on with indifference: “They’re _too_ real! They’re selfish
brutes.”
Mrs. Jordan, turning it over, adopted at last the plan of treating it
with a smile. She wished to be liberal. “Well, of course, they do lay
it out.”
“They bore me to death,” her companion pursued with slightly more
temperance.
But this was going too far. “Ah that’s because you’ve no sympathy!”
The girl gave an ironic laugh, only retorting that nobody could have
any who had to count all day all the words in the dictionary; a
contention Mrs. Jordan quite granted, the more that she shuddered at
the notion of ever failing of the very gift to which she owed the
vogue—the rage she might call it—that had caught her up. Without
sympathy—or without imagination, for it came back again to that—how
should she get, for big dinners, down the middle and toward the far
corners at all? It wasn’t the combinations, which were easily managed:
the strain was over the ineffable simplicities, those that the
bachelors above all, and Lord Rye perhaps most of any, threw off—just
blew off like cigarette-puffs—such sketches of. The betrothed of Mr.
Mudge at all events accepted the explanation, which had the effect, as
almost any turn of their talk was now apt to have, of bringing her
round to the terrific question of that gentleman. She was tormented
with the desire to get out of Mrs. Jordan, on this subject, what she
was sure was at the back of Mrs. Jordan’s head; and to get it out of
her, queerly enough, if only to vent a certain irritation at it. She
knew that what her friend would already have risked if she hadn’t been
timid and tortuous was: “Give him up—yes, give him up: you’ll see that
with your sure chances you’ll be able to do much better.”
Our young woman had a sense that if that view could only be put before
her with a particular sniff for poor Mr. Mudge she should hate it as
much as she morally ought. She was conscious of not, as yet, hating it
quite so much as that. But she saw that Mrs. Jordan was conscious of
something too, and that there was a degree of confidence she was
waiting little by little to arrive at. The day came when the girl
caught a glimpse of what was still wanting to make her friend feel
strong; which was nothing less than the prospect of being able to
announce the climax of sundry private dreams. The associate of the
aristocracy had personal calculations—matter for brooding and dreaming,
even for peeping out not quite hopelessly from behind the
window-curtains of lonely lodgings. If she did the flowers for the
bachelors, in short, didn’t she expect that to have consequences very
different from such an outlook at Cocker’s as she had pronounced wholly
desperate? There seemed in very truth something auspicious in the
mixture of bachelors and flowers, though, when looked hard in the eye,
Mrs. Jordan was not quite prepared to say she had expected a positive
proposal from Lord Rye to pop out of it. Our young woman arrived at
last, none the less, at a definite vision of what was in her mind. This
was a vivid foreknowledge that the betrothed of Mr. Mudge would, unless
conciliated in advance by a successful rescue, almost hate her on the
day she should break a particular piece of news. How could that
unfortunate otherwise endure to hear of what, under the protection of
Lady Ventnor, was after all so possible.