remarkable, had spared her the necessity of contributing at all publicly
to bridge. When Mr. Cocker's young men stepped over from behind the
other counter to change a five-pound note--and Mr. Cocker's situation,
with the cream of the "Court Guide" and the dearest furnished apartments,
Simpkin's, Ladle's, Thrupp's, just round the corner, was so select that
his place was quite pervaded by the crisp rustle of these emblems--she
pushed out the sovereigns as if the applicant were no more to her than
one of the momentary, the practically featureless, appearances in the
great procession; and this perhaps all the more from the very fact of the
connexion (only recognised outside indeed) to which she had lent herself
with ridiculous inconsequence. She recognised the others the less
because she had at last so unreservedly, so irredeemably, recognised Mr.
Mudge. However that might be, she was a little ashamed of having to
admit to herself that Mr. Mudge's removal to a higher sphere--to a more
commanding position, that is, though to a much lower neighbourhood--would
have been described still better as a luxury than as the mere
simplification, the corrected awkwardness, that she contented herself
with calling it. He had at any rate ceased to be all day long in her
eyes, and this left something a little fresh for them to rest on of a
Sunday. During the three months of his happy survival at Cocker's after
her consent to their engagement she had often asked herself what it was
marriage would be able to add to a familiarity that seemed already to
have scraped the platter so clean. Opposite there, behind the counter of
which his superior stature, his whiter apron, his more clustering curls
and more present, too present, _h_'s had been for a couple of years the
principal ornament, he had moved to and fro before her as on the small
sanded floor of their contracted future. She was conscious now of the
improvement of not having to take her present and her future at once.
They were about as much as she could manage when taken separate.