being affectionate and wise about it. There were
times when she wondered how in the world she could "put up with" him, how
she could put up with any man so smugly unconscious of the immensity of
her difference. It was just for this difference that, if she was to be
liked at all, she wanted to be liked, and if that was not the source of
Mr. Mudge's admiration, she asked herself what on earth _could_ be? She
was not different only at one point, she was different all round; unless
perhaps indeed in being practically human, which her mind just barely
recognised that he also was. She would have made tremendous concessions
in other quarters: there was no limit for instance to those she would
have made to Captain Everard; but what I have named was the most she was
prepared to do for Mr. Mudge. It was because _he_ was different that, in
the oddest way, she liked as well as deplored him; which was after all a
proof that the disparity, should they frankly recognise it, wouldn't
necessarily be fatal. She felt that, oleaginous--too oleaginous--as he
was, he was somehow comparatively primitive: she had once, during the
portion of his time at Cocker's that had overlapped her own, seen him
collar a drunken soldier, a big violent man who, having come in with a
mate to get a postal-order cashed, had made a grab at the money before
his friend could reach it and had so determined, among the hams and
cheeses and the lodgers from Thrupp's, immediate and alarming reprisals,
a scene of scandal and consternation. Mr. Buckton and the counter-clerk
had crouched within the cage, but Mr. Mudge had, with a very quiet but
very quick step round the counter, an air of masterful authority she
shouldn't soon forget, triumphantly interposed in the scrimmage, parted
the combatants and shaken the delinquent in his skin. She had been proud
of him at that moment, and had felt that if their affair had not already
been settled the neatness of his execution would have left her without
resistance.

Their affair had been settled by other things: by the evident sincerity
of his passion and by the sense that his high white apron resembled a
front of many floors. It had gone a great way with her that he would
build up a business to his chin, which he carried quite in the air. This
could only be a question of time; he would have all Piccadilly in the pen
behind his ear. That was a merit in itself for a girl who had known what
she had known. There were hour