several for whom, in allusion perhaps to his complexion, he was "the Pink
'Un." Once, once only by good luck, he had, coinciding comically, quite
miraculously, with another person also near to her, been "Mudge." Yes,
whatever he was, it was a part of his happiness--whatever he was and
probably whatever he wasn't. And his happiness was a part--it became so
little by little--of something that, almost from the first of her being
at Cocker's, had been deeply with the girl.




CHAPTER V


This was neither more nor less than the queer extension of her
experience, the double life that, in the cage, she grew at last to lead.
As the weeks went on there she lived more and more into the world of
whiffs and glimpses, she found her divinations work faster and stretch
further. It was a prodigious view as the pressure heightened, a panorama
fed with facts and figures, flushed with a torrent of colour and
accompanied with wondrous world-music. What it mainly came to at this
period was a picture of how London could amuse itself; and that, with the
running commentary of a witness so exclusively a witness, turned for the
most part to a hardening of the heart. The nose of this observer was
brushed by the bouquet, yet she could never really pluck even a daisy.
What could still remain fresh in her daily grind was the immense
disparity, the difference and contrast, from class to class, of every
instant and every motion. There were times when all the wires in the
country seemed to start from the little hole-and-corner where she plied
for a livelihood, and where, in the shuffle of feet, the flutter of