CHAPTER VII
"Then you DO see them?" the girl again asked.
Mrs. Jordan hesitated, and indeed the point had been ambiguous
before. "Do you mean the guests?"
Her young friend, cautious about an undue exposure of innocence,
was not quite sure. "Well--the people who live there."
"Lady Ventnor? Mrs. Bubb? Lord Rye? Dear, yes. Why they LIKE
one."
"But does one personally KNOW them?" our young lady went on, since
that was the way to speak. "I mean socially, don't you know?--as
you know ME."
"They're not so nice as you!" Mrs. Jordan charmingly cried. "But I
SHALL see more and more of them."
Ah this was the old story. "But how soon?"
"Why almost any day. Of course," Mrs. Jordan honestly added,
"they're nearly always out."
"Then why do they want flowers all over?"
"Oh that doesn't make any difference." Mrs. Jordan was not
philosophic; she was just evidently determined it SHOULDN'T make
any. "They're awfully interested in my ideas, and it's inevitable
they should meet me over them."
Her interlocutress was sturdy enough. "What do you call your
ideas?"
Mrs. Jordan's reply was fine. "If you were to see me some day with
a thousand tulips you'd discover."
"A thousand?"--the girl gaped at such a revelation of the scale of
it; she felt for the instant fairly planted out. "Well, but if in
fact they never do meet you?" she none the less pessimistically
insisted.
"Never? They OFTEN do--and evidently quite on purpose. We have
grand long talks."
There was something in our young lady that could still stay her
from asking for a personal description of these apparitions; that
showed too starved a state. But while she considered she took in
afresh the whole of the clergyman's widow. Mrs. Jordan couldn't
help her teeth, and her sleeves were a distinct rise in the world.
A thousand tulips at a shilling clearly took one further than a
thousand words at a penny; and the betrothed of Mr. Mudge, in whom
the sense of the race for life was always acute, found herself
wondering, with a twinge of her easy jealousy, if it mightn't after
all then, for HER also, be better--better than where she was--to
follow some such scent. Where she was was where Mr. Buckton's
elbow could freely enter her right side and the counter-clerk's
breathing--he had something the matter with his nose--pervade her
left ear. It was something 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 woman!" she had for him the finest of her chills: "She's
the widow of a bishop." She always felt, with the counter-clerk,
that it was impossible sufficiently to put it on; for what she
wished to express to him was the maximum of her contempt, and that
element in her nature was confusedly stored. "A bishop" was
putting it on, but the counter-clerk's approaches were vile. The
night, after this, when, in the fulness of time, Mrs. Jordan
mentioned the grand long talks, the girl at last brought out:
"Should I see them?--I mean if I WERE to give up everything for
you."
Mrs. Jordan at this became most arch. "I'd send you to all the
bachelors!"
Our young lady could be reminded by such a remark that she usually
struck her friend as pretty. "Do THEY have their flowers?"
"Oceans. And they're the most particular." Oh it was a wonderful
world. "You should see Lord Rye's."
"His flowers?"
"Yes, and his letters. He writes me pages on pages--with the most
adorable little drawings and plans. You should see his diagrams!"
