but little of her long telegram to his lordship. It was a strange
whirligig that had converted the clergyman's widow into such a specimen
of the class that went beyond the sixpence.

Nothing of the occasion, all the more, had ever become dim; least of all
the way that, as her recovered friend looked up from counting, Mrs.
Jordan had just blown, in explanation, through her teeth and through the
bars of the cage: "I _do_ flowers, you know." Our young woman had
always, with her little finger crooked out, a pretty movement for
counting; and she had not forgotten the small secret advantage, a
sharpness of triumph it might even have been called, that fell upon her
at this moment and avenged her for the incoherence of the message, an
unintelligible enumeration of numbers, colours, days, hours. The
correspondence of people she didn't know was one thing; but the
correspondence of people she did had an aspect of its own for her even
when she couldn't understand it. The speech in which Mrs. Jordan had
defined a position and announced a profession was like a tinkle of
bluebells; but for herself her one idea about flowers was that people had
them at funerals, and her present sole gleam of light was that lords
probably had them most. When she watched, a minute later, through the
cage, the swing of her visitor's departing petticoats, she saw the sight
from the waist down; and when the counter-clerk, after a mere male
glance, remarked, with an intention unmistakeably low, "Handsome woman!"
she had for him the finest of her chills: "She's the widow of a bishop."
She always felt, with the counter-clerk, that it was impossible
sufficiently to put it on; for what she wished to express to him was the
maximum of her contempt, and that element in her nature was confusedly
stored. "A bishop" was putting it on, but the counter-clerk's approaches
were vile. The night, after this, when, in the fulness of time, Mrs.
Jordan mentioned the grand long talks, the girl at last brought out: