<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
<p>It was always rather quiet at Cocker’s while the contingent
from Ladle’s and Thrupp’s and all the other great places
were at luncheon, or, as the young men used vulgarly to say, while the
animals were feeding. She had forty minutes in advance of this
to go home for her own dinner; and when she came back and one of the
young men took his turn there was often half an hour during which she
could pull out a bit of work or a book—a book from the place where
she borrowed novels, very greasy, in fine print and all about fine folks,
at a ha’penny a day. This sacred pause was one of the numerous
ways in which the establishment kept its finger on the pulse of fashion
and fell into the rhythm of the larger life. It had something
to do, one day, with the particular flare of importance of an arriving
customer, a lady whose meals were apparently irregular, yet whom she
was destined, she afterwards found, not to forget. The girl was
blasée; nothing could belong more, as she perfectly knew, to
the intense publicity of her profession; but she had a whimsical mind
and wonderful nerves; she was subject, in short, to sudden flickers
of antipathy and sympathy, red gleams in the grey, fitful needs to notice
and to “care,” odd caprices of curiosity. She had
a friend who had invented a new career for women—that of being
in and out of people’s houses to look after the flowers.
Mrs. Jordan had a manner of her own of sounding this allusion; “the
flowers,” on her lips, were, in fantastic places, in happy homes,
as usual as the coals or the daily papers. She took charge of
them, at any rate, in all the rooms, at so much a month, and people
were quickly finding out what it was to make over this strange burden
of the pampered to the widow of a clergyman. The widow, on her
side, dilating on the initiations thus opened up to her, had been splendid
to her young friend, over the way she was made free of the greatest
houses—the way, especially when she did the dinner-tables, set
out so often for twenty, she felt that a single step more would transform
her whole social position. On its being asked of her then if she
circulated only in a sort of tropical solitude, with the upper servants
for picturesque natives, and on her having to assent to this glance
at her limitations, she had found a reply to the girl’s invidious
question. “You’ve no imagination, my dear!”—that
was because a door more than half open to the higher life couldn’t
be called anything but a thin partition. Mrs. Jordan’s imagination
quite did away with the thickness.</p>
<p>Our young lady had not taken up the charge, had dealt with it good-humouredly,
just because she knew so well what to think of it. It was at once
one of her most cherished complaints and most secret supports that people
didn’t understand her, and it was accordingly a matter of indifference
to her that Mrs. Jordan shouldn’t; even though Mrs. Jordan, handed
down from their early twilight of gentility and also the victim of reverses,
was the only member of her circle in whom she recognised an equal.
She was perfectly aware that her imaginative life was the life in which
she spent most of her time; and she would have been ready, had it been
at all worth while, to contend that, since her outward occupation didn’t
kill it, it must be strong indeed. Combinations of flowers and
green-stuff, forsooth! What <i>she</i> could handle freely, she
said to herself, was combinations of men and women. The only weakness
in her faculty came from the positive abundance of her contact with
the human herd; this was so constant, it had so the effect of cheapening
her privilege, that there were long stretches in which inspiration,
divination and interest quite dropped. The great thing was the
flashes, the quick revivals, absolute accidents all, and neither to
be counted on nor to be resisted. Some one had only sometimes
to put in a penny for a stamp and the whole thing was upon her.
She was so absurdly constructed that these were literally the moments
that made up—made up for the long stiffness of sitting there in
the stocks, made up for the cunning hostility of Mr. Buckton and the
importunate sympathy of the counter-clerk, made up for the daily deadly
flourishy letter from Mr. Mudge, made up even for the most haunting
of her worries, the rage at moments of not knowing how her mother did
“get it.”</p>
<p>She had surrendered herself moreover of late to a certain expansion
of her consciousness; something that seemed perhaps vulgarly accounted
for by the fact that, as the blast of the season roared louder and the
waves of fashion tossed their spray further over the counter, there
were more impressions to be gathered and really—for it came to
that—more life to be led. Definite at any rate it was that
by the time May was well started the kind of company she kept at Cocker’s
had begun to strike her as a reason—a reason she might almost
put forward for a policy of procrastination. It sounded silly,
of course, as yet, to plead such a motive, especially as the fascination
of the place was after all a sort of torment. But she liked her
torment; it was a torment she should miss at Chalk Farm. She was
ingenious and uncandid, therefore, about leaving the breadth of London
a little longer between herself and that austerity. If she hadn’t
quite the courage in short to say to Mr. Mudge that her actual chance
for a play of mind was worth any week the three shillings he desired
to help her to save, she yet saw something happen in the course of the
month that in her heart of hearts at least answered the subtle question.
This was connected precisely with the appearance of the memorable lady.</p>
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