illionth part!" she replied with some
sharpness. "It's immense fun"--she _had_ to tantalise him. Then as she
had heard Mrs. Jordan say, and as the ladies at Cocker's even sometimes
wired, "It's quite too dreadful!" She could fully feel how it was Mr.
Mudge's propriety, which was extreme--he had a horror of coarseness and
attended a Wesleyan chapel--that prevented his asking for details. But
she gave him some of the more innocuous in spite of himself, especially
putting before him how, at Simpkin's and Ladle's, they all made the money
fly. That was indeed what he liked to hear: the connexion was not
direct, but one was somehow more in the right place where the money was
flying than where it was simply and meagrely nesting. The air felt that
stir, he had to acknowledge, much less at Chalk Farm than in the district
in which his beloved so oddly enjoyed her footing. She gave him, she
could see, a restless sense that these might be familiarities not to be
sacrificed; germs, possibilities, faint foreshowings--heaven knew what--of
the initiation it would prove profitable to have arrived at when in the
fulness of time he should have his own shop in some such paradise. What
really touched him--that was discernible--was that she could feed him
with so much mere vividness of reminder, keep before him, as by the play
of a fan, the very wind of the swift bank-notes and the charm of the
existence of a class that Providence had raised up to be the blessing of
grocers. He liked to think that the class was there, that it was always
there, and that she contributed in her slight but appreciable degree to
keep it up to the mark. He couldn't have formulated his theory of the
matter, but the exuberance of the aristocracy was the advantage of trade,
and everything was knit together in a richness of pattern that it was
good to follow with one's finger-tips. It was a comfort to him to be
thus assured that there were no symptoms of a drop. What did the
sounder, as she called it, nimbly worked, do but keep the ball going?

What it came to therefore for Mr. Mudge was that all enjoyments were, as
might be said, inter-related, and that the more people had the more they
wanted to have. The more flirtations, as he might roughly express it,
the more cheese and pickles. He had even in his own small way been dimly
struck with the linked sweetness connecting the tender passion with cheap
champagne, or perhaps the other way round. What he woul