ething to fill an office under Government, and she
knew but too well there were places commoner still than Cocker's; but it
needed no great range of taste to bring home to her the picture of
servitude and promiscuity she couldn't but offer to the eye of
comparative freedom. She was so boxed up with her young men, and
anything like a margin so absent, that it needed more art than she should
ever possess to pretend in the least to compass, with any one in the
nature of an acquaintance--say with Mrs. Jordan herself, flying in, as it
might happen, to wire sympathetically to Mrs. Bubb--an approach to a
relation of elegant privacy. She remembered the day when Mrs. Jordan
_had_, in fact, by the greatest chance, come in with fifty-three words
for Lord Rye and a five-pound note to change. This had been the dramatic
manner of their reunion--their mutual recognition was so great an event.
The girl could at first only see her from the waist up, besides making
but little of her long telegram to his lordship. It was a strange
whirligig that had converted the clergyman's widow into such a specimen
of the class that went beyond the sixpence.

Nothing of the occasion, all the more, had ever become dim; least of all
the way that, as her recovered friend looked up from counting, Mrs.
Jordan had just blown, in explanation, through her teeth and through the
bars of the cage: "I _do_ flowers, you know." Our young woman had
always, with her little finger crooked out, a pretty movement for
counting; and she had not forgotten the small secret advantage, a
sharpness of triumph it might even have been called, that fell upon her
at this moment and avenged her for the incoherence of the message, an
unintelligible enumeration of numbers, colours, days, hours. The
correspondence of people she didn't know was one thing; but the
correspondence of people she did had an aspect of its own for her even
when she couldn't understand it. The speech in which Mrs. Jordan had
defined a position and announced a profession was like a tinkle of
bluebells; but for herself her one idea about flowers was that people had
them at funerals, and her present sole gleam of light was that lords
probably had them most. When she watched, a minute later, through the
cage, the swing of her visitor's departing petticoats, she saw the sight
from the waist down; and when the counter-clerk, after a mere male
glance, remarked, with an intention unmistakeably low, "Handsome wom