iumphant shoulders, and strode out of the place.

She was left confronted with her habitual critics. "'If it's wrong it's
all right!'" she extravagantly quoted to them.

The counter-clerk was really awe-stricken. "But how did you know, dear?"

"I remembered, love!"

Mr. Buckton, on the contrary, was rude. "And what game is that, miss?"

No happiness she had ever known came within miles of it, and some minutes
elapsed before she could recall herself sufficiently to reply that it was
none of his business.

CHAPTER XXIV

If life at Cocker's, with the dreadful drop of August, had lost something
of its savour, she had not been slow to infer that a heavier blight had
fallen on the graceful industry of Mrs. Jordan.

With Lord Rye and Lady Ventnor and Mrs. Bubb all out of town, with the
blinds down on all the homes of luxury, this ingenious woman might well
have found her wonderful taste left quite on her hands. She bore up,
however, in a way that began by exciting much of her young friend's
esteem; they perhaps even more frequently met as the wine of life flowed
less free from other sources, and each, in the lack of better diversion,
carried on with more mystification for the other an intercourse that
consisted not a little in peeping out and drawing back. Each waited for
the other to commit herself, each profusely curtained for the other the
limits of low horizons. Mrs. Jordan was indeed probably the more
reckless skirmisher; nothing could exceed her frequent incoherence unless
it was indeed her occasional bursts of confidence. Her account of her
private affairs rose and fell like a flame in the wind--sometimes the
bravest bonfire and sometimes a handful of ashes. This our young woman
took to be an effect of the position, at one moment and another, of the
famous door of the great world. She had been struck in one of her
ha'penny volumes with the translation of a French proverb according to
which such a door, any door, had to be either open or shut; and it seemed
part of the precariousness of Mrs. Jordan's life that hers mostly managed
to be neither. There had been occasions when it appeared to gape
wide--fairly to woo her across its threshold; there had been others, of
an order distinctly disconcerting, when it was all but banged in her
face. On the whole, however, she had evidently not lost heart; these
still belonged to the class of things in spite of which she looked well.
She intimated that the