profits of her trade had swollen so as to float
her through any state of the tide, and she had, besides this, a hundred
profundities and explanations.

She rose superior, above all, on the happy fact that there were always
gentlemen in town and that gentlemen were her greatest admirers;
gentlemen from the City in especial--as to whom she was full of
information about the passion and pride excited in such breasts by the
elements of her charming commerce. The City men did in short go in for
flowers. There was a certain type of awfully smart stockbroker--Lord Rye
called them Jews and bounders, but she didn't care--whose extravagance,
she more than once threw out, had really, if one had any conscience, to
be forcibly restrained. It was not perhaps a pure love of beauty: it was
a matter of vanity and a sign of business; they wished to crush their
rivals, and that was one of their weapons. Mrs. Jordan's shrewdness was
extreme; she knew in any case her customer--she dealt, as she said, with
all sorts; and it was at the worst a race for her--a race even in the
dull months--from one set of chambers to another. And then, after all,
there were also still the ladies; the ladies of stockbroking circles were
perpetually up and down. They were not quite perhaps Mrs. Bubb or Lady
Ventnor; but you couldn't tell the difference unless you quarrelled with
them, and then you knew it only by their making-up sooner. These ladies
formed the branch of her subject on which she most swayed in the breeze;
to that degree that her confidant had ended with an inference or two
tending to banish regret for opportunities not embraced. There were
indeed tea-gowns that Mrs. Jordan described--but tea-gowns were not the
whole of respectability, and it was odd that a clergyman's widow should
sometimes speak as if she almost thought so. She came back, it was true,
unfailingly to Lord Rye, never, evidently, quite losing sight of him even
on the longest excursions. That he was kindness itself had become in
fact the very moral it all pointed--pointed in strange flashes of the
poor woman's nearsighted eyes. She launched at her young friend
portentous looks, solemn heralds of some extraordinary communication. The
communication itself, from week to week, hung fire; but it was to the
facts over which it hovered that she owed her power of going on. "They
are, in one way and another," she often emphasised, "a tower of
strength"; and as the allusion was to