an hour during which she could pull out a bit of work or a book--a book
from the place where she borrowed novels, very greasy, in fine print and
all about fine folks, at a ha'penny a day. This sacred pause was one of
the numerous ways in which the establishment kept its finger on the pulse
of fashion and fell into the rhythm of the larger life. It had something
to do, one day, with the particular flare of importance of an arriving
customer, a lady whose meals were apparently irregular, yet whom she was
destined, she afterwards found, not to forget. The girl was blasee;
nothing could belong more, as she perfectly knew, to the intense
publicity of her profession; but she had a whimsical mind and wonderful
nerves; she was subject, in short, to sudden flickers of antipathy and
sympathy, red gleams in the grey, fitful needs to notice and to "care,"
odd caprices of curiosity. She had a friend who had invented a new
career for women--that of being in and out of people's houses to look
after the flowers. Mrs. Jordan had a manner of her own of sounding this
allusion; "the flowers," on her lips, were, in fantastic places, in happy
homes, as usual as the coals or the daily papers. She took charge of
them, at any rate, in all the rooms, at so much a month, and people were
quickly finding out what it was to make over this strange burden of the
pampered to the widow of a clergyman. The widow, on her side, dilating
on the initiations thus opened up to her, had been splendid to her young
friend, over the way she was made free of the greatest houses--the way,
especially when she did the dinner-tables, set out so often for twenty,
she felt that a single step more would transform her whole social
position. On its being asked of her then if she circulated only in a
sort of tropical solitude, with the upper servants for picturesque
natives, and on her having to assent to this glance at her limitations,
she had found a reply to the girl's invidious question. "You've no
imagination, my dear!"--that was because a door more than half open to
the higher life couldn't be called anything but a thin partition. Mrs.