"Never? They _often_ do--and evidently quite on purpose. We have grand
long talks."

There was something in our young lady that could still stay her from
asking for a personal description of these apparitions; that showed too
starved a state. But while she considered she took in afresh the whole
of the clergyman's widow. Mrs. Jordan couldn't help her teeth, and her
sleeves were a distinct rise in the world. A thousand tulips at a
shilling clearly took one further than a thousand words at a penny; and
the betrothed of Mr. Mudge, in whom the sense of the race for life was
always acute, found herself wondering, with a twinge of her easy
jealousy, if it mightn't after all then, for _her_ also, be better--better
than where she was--to follow some such scent. Where she was was where
Mr. Buckton's elbow could freely enter her right side and the counter-
clerk's breathing--he had something the matter with his nose--pervade her
left ear. It was something to fill an office under Government, and she
knew but too well there were places commoner still than Cocker's; but it
needed no great range of taste to bring home to her the picture of
servitude and promiscuity she couldn't but offer to the eye of
comparative freedom. She was so boxed up with her young men, and
anything like a margin so absent, that it needed more art than she should
ever possess to pretend in the least to compass, with any one in the
nature of an acquaintance--say with Mrs. Jordan herself, flying in, as it
might happen, to wire sympathetically to Mrs. Bubb--an approach to a
relation of elegant privacy. She remembered the day when Mrs. Jordan
_had_, in fact, by the greatest chance, come in with fifty-three words
for Lord Rye and a five-pound note to change. This had been the dramatic
manner of their reunion--their mutual recognition was so great an event.
The girl could at first only see her from the waist up, besides making