attractive; easier, smoother, sociably brighter, slightly more
picturesque, in short more propitious in general to his little affairs,
than any other establishment just thereabouts. She was quite aware that
they couldn't be, in so huddled a hole, particularly quick; but she found
her account in the slowness--she certainly could bear it if _he_ could.
The great pang was that just thereabouts post-offices were so awfully
thick. She was always seeing him in imagination in other places and with
other girls. But she would defy any other girl to follow him as she
followed. And though they weren't, for so many reasons, quick at
Cocker's, she could hurry for him when, through an intimation light as
air, she gathered that he was pressed.

When hurry was, better still, impossible, it was because of the
pleasantest thing of all, the particular element of their contact--she
would have called it their friendship--that consisted of an almost
humorous treatment of the look of some of his words. They would never
perhaps have grown half so intimate if he had not, by the blessing of
heaven, formed some of his letters with a queerness--! It was positive
that the queerness could scarce have been greater if he had practised it
for the very purpose of bringing their heads together over it as far as
was possible to heads on different sides of a wire fence. It had taken
her truly but once or twice to master these tricks, but, at the cost of
striking him perhaps as stupid, she could still challenge them when
circumstances favoured. The great circumstance that favoured was that
she sometimes actually believed he knew she only feigned perplexity. If
he knew it therefore he tolerated it; if he tolerated it he came back;
and if he came back he liked her. This was her seventh heaven; and she
didn't ask much of his liking--she only asked of it to reach the point of
his not going away because of her own. He had at times to be away for
weeks; he had to lead lets life; he had to travel--there were places to