CHAPTER VIII
The girl had in course of time every opportunity to inspect these
documents, and they a little disappointed her; but in the mean
while there had been more talk, and it had led to her saying, as if
her friend's guarantee of a life of elegance were not quite
definite: "Well, I see every one at MY place."
"Every one?"
"Lots of swells. They flock. They live, you know, all round, and
the place is filled with all the smart people, all the fast people,
those whose names are in the papers--mamma has still The Morning
Post--and who come up for the season."
Mrs. Jordan took this in with complete intelligence. "Yes, and I
dare say it's some of your people that I do."
Her companion assented, but discriminated. "I doubt if you 'do'
them as much as I! Their affairs, their appointments and
arrangements, their little games and secrets and vices--those
things all pass before me."
This was a picture that could make a clergyman's widow not
imperceptibly gasp; it was in intention moreover something of a
retort to the thousand tulips. "Their vices? Have they got
vices?"
Our young critic even more overtly stared then with a touch of
contempt in her amusement: "Haven't you found THAT out?" The
homes of luxury then hadn't so much to give. "I find out
everything."
Mrs. Jordan, at bottom a very meek person, was visibly struck. "I
see. You do 'have' them."
"Oh I don't care! Much good it does me!"
Mrs. Jordan after an instant recovered her superiority. "No--it
doesn't lead to much." Her own initiations so clearly did. Still-
-after all; and she was not jealous: "There must be a charm."
"In seeing them?" At this the girl suddenly let herself go. "I
hate them. There's that charm!"
Mrs. Jordan gaped again. "The REAL 'smarts'?"
"Is that what you call Mrs. Bubb? Yes--it comes to me; I've had
Mrs. Bubb. I don't think she has been in herself, but there are
things her maid has brought. Well, my dear!"--and the young person
from Cocker's, recalling these things and summing them up, seemed
suddenly to have much to say. She didn't say it, however; she
checked it; she only brought out: "Her maid, who's horrid--SHE
must have her!" Then she went on with indifference: "They're TOO
real! They're selfish brutes."
Mrs. Jordan, turning it over, adopted at last the plan of treating
it with a smile. She wished to be liberal. "Well, of course, they
do lay it out."
"They bore me to death," her companion pursued with slightly more
temperance.
But this was going too far. "Ah that's because you've no
sympathy!"
The girl gave an ironic laugh, only retorting that nobody could
have any who had to count all day all the words in the dictionary;
a contention Mrs. Jordan quite granted, the more that she shuddered
at the notion of ever failing of the very gift to which she owed
the vogue--the rage she might call it--that had caught her up.
Without sympathy--or without imagination, for it came back again to
that--how should she get, for big dinners, down the middle and
toward the far corners at all? It wasn't the combinations, which
were easily managed: the strain was over the ineffable
simplicities, those that the bachelors above all, and Lord Rye
perhaps most of any, threw off--just blew off like cigarette-puffs-
-such sketches of. The betrothed of Mr. Mudge at all events
accepted the explanation, which had the effect, as almost any turn
of their talk was now apt to have, of bringing her round to the
terrific question of that gentleman. She was tormented with the
desire to get out of Mrs. Jordan, on this subject, what she was
sure was at the back of Mrs. Jordan's head; and to get it out of
her, queerly enough, if only to vent a certain irritation at it.
She knew that what her friend would already have risked if she
hadn't been timid and tortuous was: "Give him up--yes, give him
up: you'll see that with your sure chances you'll be able to do
much better."
Our young woman had a sense that if that view could only be put
before her with a particular sniff for poor Mr. Mudge she should
hate it as much as she morally ought. She was conscious of not, as
yet, hating it quite so much as that. But she saw that Mrs. Jordan
was conscious of something too, and that there was a degree of
confidence she was waiting little by little to arrive at. The day
came when the girl caught a glimpse of what was still wanting to
make her friend feel strong; which was nothing less than the
prospect of being able to announce the climax of sundry private
dreams. The associate of the aristocracy had personal
calculations--matter for brooding and dreaming, even for peeping
out not quite hopelessly from behind the window-curtains of lonely
lodgings. If she did the flowers for the bachelors, in short,
didn't she expect that to have consequences very different from
such an outlook at Cocker's as she had pronounced wholly desperate?
There seemed in very truth something auspicious in the mixture of
bachelors and flowers, though, when looked hard in the eye, Mrs.
Jordan was not quite prepared to say she had expected a positive
proposal from Lord Rye to pop out of it. Our young woman arrived
at last, none the less, at a definite vision of what was in her
mind. This was a vivid foreknowledge that the betrothed of Mr.
Mudge would, unless conciliated in advance by a successful rescue,
almost hate her on the day she should break a particular piece of
news. How could that unfortunate otherwise endure to hear of what,
under the protection of Lady Ventnor, was after all so possible
