stopgaps, like their own, all gone, had, across the sordid landing on
which the opposite doors of the pair of scared miseries opened and to
which they were bewilderedly bolted, borrowed coals and umbrellas that
were repaid in potatoes and postage-stamps. It had been a questionable
help, at that time, to ladies submerged, floundering, panting, swimming
for their lives, that they were ladies; but such an advantage could come
up again in proportion as others vanished, and it had grown very great by
the time it was the only ghost of one they possessed. They had literally
watched it take to itself a portion of the substance of each that had
departed; and it became prodigious now, when they could talk of it
together, when they could look back at it across a desert of accepted
derogation, and when, above all, they could together work up a credulity
about it that neither could otherwise work up. Nothing was really so
marked as that they felt the need to cultivate this legend much more
after having found their feet and stayed their stomachs in the ultimate
obscure than they had done in the upper air of mere frequent shocks. The
thing they could now oftenest say to each other was that they knew what
they meant; and the sentiment with which, all round, they knew it was
known had well-nigh amounted to a promise not again to fall apart.

Mrs. Jordan was at present fairly dazzling on the subject of the way
that, in the practice of her fairy art, as she called it, she more than
peeped in--she penetrated. There was not a house of the great kind--and
it was of course only a question of those, real homes of luxury--in which
she was not, at the rate such people now had things, all over the place.
The girl felt before the picture the cold breath of disinheritance as
much as she had ever felt it in the cage; she knew moreover how much she
betrayed this, for the experience of poverty had begun, in her life, too
early, and her ignorance of the requirements of homes of luxury had
grown, with other active knowledge, a depth of simplification. She had