Little by little, to her own stupefaction, she caught that he was trying
to take it as she meant it and that he was neither astonished nor angry.
Oh the British tradesman--this gave her an idea of his resources! Mr.
Mudge would be angry only with a person who, like the drunken soldier in
the shop, should have an unfavourable effect on business. He seemed
positively to enter, for the time and without the faintest flash of irony
or ripple of laughter, into the whimsical grounds of her enjoyment of
Cocker's custom, and instantly to be casting up whatever it might, as
Mrs. Jordan had said, lead to. What he had in mind was not of course
what Mrs. Jordan had had: it was obviously not a source of speculation
with him that his sweetheart might pick up a husband. She could see
perfectly that this was not for a moment even what he supposed she
herself dreamed of. What she had done was simply to give his sensibility
another push into the dim vast of trade. In that direction it was all
alert, and she had whisked before it the mild fragrance of a "connexion."
That was the most he could see in any account of her keeping in, on
whatever roundabout lines, with the gentry; and when, getting to the
bottom of this, she quickly proceeded to show him the kind of eye she
turned on such people and to give him a sketch of what that eye
discovered, she reduced him to the particular prostration in which he
could still be amusing to her.




CHAPTER X


"They're the most awful wretches, I assure you--the lot all about there."