this often came round to her afterwards, for she had an extraordinary way
of keeping clues. When she noticed she noticed; that was what it came
to. There were days and days, there were weeks sometimes, of vacancy.
This arose often from Mr. Buckton's devilish and successful subterfuges
for keeping her at the sounder whenever it looked as if anything might
arouse; the sounder, which it was equally his business to mind, being the
innermost cell of captivity, a cage within the cage, fenced oft from the
rest by a frame of ground glass. The counter-clerk would have played
into her hands; but the counter-clerk was really reduced to idiocy by the
effect of his passion for her. She flattered herself moreover, nobly,
that with the unpleasant conspicuity of this passion she would never have
consented to be obliged to him. The most she would ever do would be
always to shove off on him whenever she could the registration of
letters, a job she happened particularly to loathe. After the long
stupors, at all events, there almost always suddenly would come a sharp
taste of something; it was in her mouth before she knew it; it was in her
mouth now.

To Cissy, to Mary, whichever it was, she found her curiosity going out
with a rush, a mute effusion that floated back to her, like a returning
tide, the living colour and splendour of the beautiful head, the light of
eyes that seemed to reflect such utterly other things than the mean
things actually before them; and, above all, the high curt consideration
of a manner that even at bad moments was a magnificent habit and of the
very essence of the innumerable things--her beauty, her birth, her father
and mother, her cousins and all her ancestors--that its possessor
couldn't have got rid of even had she wished. How did our obscure little
public servant know that for the lady of the telegrams this was a bad
moment? How did she guess all sorts of impossible things, such as,
almost on the very spot, the presence of drama at a critical stage and