uckton
luckily continued with the sounder. This morning everything changed, but
rather to dreariness; she had to swallow the rebuff to her theory about
fatal desires, which she did without confusion and indeed 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
de