Mary nor as Cissy; but the girl was sure of whom it was, in Eaten Square,
that he was perpetually wiring to--and all so irreproachably!--as Lady
Bradeen. Lady Bradeen was Cissy, Lady Bradeen was Mary, Lady Bradeen was
the friend of Fritz and of Gussy, the customer of Marguerite, and the
close ally in short (as was ideally right, only the girl had not yet
found a descriptive term that was) of the most magnificent of men.
Nothing could equal the frequency and variety of his communications to
her ladyship but their extraordinary, their abysmal propriety. It was
just the talk--so profuse sometimes that she wondered what was left for
their real meetings--of the very happiest people. Their real meetings
must have been constant, for half of it was appointments and allusions,
all swimming in a sea of other allusions still, tangled in a complexity
of questions that gave a wondrous image of their life. If Lady Bradeen
was Juno it was all certainly Olympian. If the girl, missing the
answers, her ladyship's own outpourings, vainly reflected that Cocker's
should have been one of the bigger offices where telegrams arrived as
well as departed, there were yet ways in which, on the whole, she pressed
the romance closer by reason of the very quantity of imagination it
demanded and consumed. The days and hours of this new friend, as she
came to account him, were at all events unrolled, and however much more
she might have known she would still have wished to go beyond. In fact
she did go beyond; she went quite far enough.

But she could none the less, even after a month, scarce have told if the
gentlemen who came in with him recurred or changed; and this in spite of
the fact that they too were always posting and wiring, smoking in her
face and signing or not signing. The gentlemen who came in with him were
nothing when he was there. They turned up alone at other times--then
only perhaps with a dim richness of reference. He himself, absent as
well as present, was all. He was very tall, very fair, and had, in spite