nia
 
 IN THE CAGE 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 HERBERT S. STONE r COMPANY 
 
 CHICAGO fir NEW YORK 
 
 MDCCCXCVIII
 
 COPYRIGHT 1898, BY 
 HERBERT S. STONE & CO.
 
 In The Cage 
 
 i 
 
 It had occurred to her early that in her 
 position that of a young person spending, 
 in framed and wired confinement, the life of 
 a guineapig or a magpie she should know a 
 great many persons without their recognis 
 ing the acquaintance. That made it an 
 emotion the more lively though singularly 
 rare and always, even then, with opportu 
 nity still very much smothered to see any 
 one come in whom she knew, as she called 
 it, outside, and who could add something to 
 the poor identity of her function. Her func 
 tion was to sit there with two young men 
 the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk ;
 
 2 IN THE CAGE 
 
 to mind the "sounder," which was always 
 going, to dole out stamps and postal orders, 
 weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give 
 difficult change and, more than anything 
 else, count words as numberless as the sands 
 of the sea, the words of the telegrams thrust, 
 from morning to night, through the gap left 
 in the high lattice, across the encumbered 
 shelf that her forearm ached with rubbing. 
 This transparent screen fenced out or fenced 
 in, according to the side of the narrow 
 counter on which the human lot was cast, the 
 duskiest corner of a shop pervaded not a lit 
 tle, in winter, by the poison of perpetual gas 
 and at all times by the presence of hams, 
 cheese, dried fish, soap, varnish, paraffin and 
 other solids and fluids that she came to know 
 perfectly by their smells without consenting 
 to know them by their names. 
 
 The barrier that divided the little post- 
 and-telegraph-office from the grocery was a 
 frail structure of wood and wire; but the 
 social, the professional separation was a gulf 
 that fortune, by a stroke quite remarkable,
 
 IN THE CAGE 3 
 
 had spared her the necessity of contributing 
 at all publicly to bridge. When Mr. Cocker s 
 young men stepped over from behind the 
 other counter to change a five-pound note 
 and Mr. Cocker s situation, with the cream 
 of the "Court Guide" and the dearest fur 
 nished apartments, Simpkin s, Ladle s, 
 Thrupp s, just round the corner, was so 
 select that his place was quite pervaded by 
 the crisp rustle of these emblems she 
 pushed out the sovereigns as if the applicant 
 were no more to her than one of the mo 
 mentary appearances in the great proces 
 sion ; and this perhaps all the more from the 
 very fact of the connection only recognised 
 outside indeed to which she had lent her 
 self with ridiculous inconsequence. She 
 recognised the others the less because she 
 had at last so unreservedly, so irredeemably 
 recognised Mr. Mudge. But she was a little 
 ashamed, none the less, of having to admit 
 to herself that Mr. Mudge s removal to a 
 higher sphere to a more commanding posi 
 tion, that is, though to a much lower neigh-
 
 4 IN THE CAGE 
 
 borhood would have been described still 
 better as a luxury than as the simplification 
 that she contented herself with calling it. 
 He had, at any rate, ceased to be all day 
 long in her eyes, and this left something a 
 little fresh for them to rest on of a Sunday. 
 During the three months that he had 
 remained at Cocker s after her consent to 
 their engagement, she had often asked her 
 self what it was that marriage would be able 
 to add to a familiarity so final. Opposite 
 there, behind the counter of which his 
 superior stature, his whiter apron, his more 
 clustering curls and more present, too 
 present, h s had been for a couple of years 
 the principal ornament, he had moved to and 
 fro before her as on the small sanded floor 
 of their contracted future. She was con 
 scious now of the improvement of not having 
 to take her present and her future at once. 
 They were about as much as she could 
 manage when taken separate. 
 
 She had, none the less, to give her mind 
 steadily to what Mr. Mudge had again
 
 IN THE CAGE 5 
 
 written her about, the idea of her applying 
 for a transfer to an office quite similar she 
 couldn t yet hope for a place in a bigger 
 under the very roof where he was foreman, 
 so that, dangled before her every minute of 
 the day, he should see her, as he called it, 
 "hourly," and in a part, the far N. W. 
 district, where, with her mother, she would 
 save, on their two rooms alone, nearly three 
 shillings. It would be far from dazzling to 
 exchange Mayfair for Chalk Farm, and it 
 was something of a predicament that he so 
 kept at her; still, it was nothing to the old 
 predicaments, those of the early times of 
 their great misery, her own, her mother s 
 and her elder sister s the last of whom had 
 succumbed to all but absolute want when, 
 as conscious, incredulous ladies, suddenly 
 bereaved, betrayed, overwhelmed, they had 
 slipped faster and faster down the steep 
 slope at the bottom of which she alone had 
 rebounded. Her mother had never re 
 bounded any more at the bottom than on 
 the way; had only rumbled and grumbled
 
 6 IN THE CAGE 
 
 down and down, making, in respect of caps 
 and conversation, no effort whatever, and 
 too often, alas, smelling of whisky.
 
 II 
 
 It was always rather quiet at Cocker s 
 while the contingent from Ladle s and 
 Thrupp s and all the other great places 
 were at luncheon, or, as the young men used 
 vulgarly to say, while the animals were 
 feeding. She had forty minutes in advance 
 of this to go home for her own dinner ; and 
 when she came back, and one of the young 
 men took his turn, there was often half 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 par 
 ticular vividness marking the advent of a 
 lady whose meals were apparently irregular,
 
 8 IN THE CAGE 
 
 yet whom she was destined, she afterwards 
 found, not to forget. The girl was blaste; 
 nothing could belong more, as she perfectly 
 knew, to the intense publicity of her pro 
 fession ; 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 awakings and 
 followings, 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 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 
 delicate duty 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,
 
 IN THE CAGE 9 
 
 the way, especially when she did the dinner- 
 tables, set out so often for twenty, she felt 
 that a single step more would socially, would 
 absolutely, introduce her. 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 limita 
 tions, she had found a reply to the girl s 
 invidious question. "You ve no imagination, 
 my dear!" that was because the social door 
 might at any moment open so wide. 
 
 Our young lady had not taken up the 
 charge, had dealt with it good-humouredly, 
 just because she knew so well what to think 
 of it. It was at once one of her most cher 
 ished complaints and most secret supports 
 that people didn t understand her, and it 
 was accordingly a matter of indifference to 
 her that Mrs. Jordan shouldn t; even though 
 Mrs. Jordan, handed down from their early 
 twilight gentility and also the victim of 
 reverses, was the only member of her circle 
 in whom she recognized an equal. She was
 
 io IN THE CAGE 
 
 perfectly aware that her imaginative life was 
 the life in which she spent most of her time ; 
 and she would have been ready, had it been 
 at all worth while, to contend that, since her 
 outward occupation didn t kill it, it must be 
 strong indeed. Combinations of flowers and 
 green stuff forsooth? What she could handle 
 freely, she said to herself, was combinations 
 of men and women. The only weakness in 
 her faculty came from the positive abund 
 ance of her contact with the human herd; 
 this was so constant, had the effect of becom 
 ing so cheap, that there were long stretches 
 in which inspiration, divination and interest, 
 quite dropped. The great thing was the 
 flashes, the quick revivals, absolute accidents 
 all and neither to be counted on nor to be 
 resisted. Some one had only sometimes to 
 put in a penny fora stamp, and the whole 
 thing was upon her. She was so absurdly 
 constructed that these were literally the 
 moments that made up made up for the 
 long stiffness of sitting there in the stocks, 
 made up for the cunning hostility of Mr.
 
 IN THE CAGE n 
 
 Buckton and the importunate sympathy of 
 the counter-clerk, made up for the daily, 
 deadly, flourishy letter from Mr. Mudge, 
 made up even for the most haunting of her 
 worries, the rage at moments of not know 
 ing how her mother did "get it." 
 
 She had surrendered herself moreover, of 
 late, to a certain expansion of her conscious 
 ness; something that seemed perhaps vul 
 garly accounted for by the fact that, as the 
 blast of the season roared louder and the 
 waves of fashion tossed their spray further 
 over the counter, there were more impres 
 sions to be gathered and really for it came 
 to that more life to be led. Definite, at 
 any rate, it was that by the time May was 
 well started the kind of company she kept 
 at Cocker s had begun to strike her as a 
 reason a reason she might almost put for 
 ward for a policy of procrastination. It 
 sounded silly, of course, as yet, to plead 
 such a motive, especially as the fascination 
 of the place was, after all, a sort of torment. 
 But she liked her torment; it was a torment
 
 12 IN THE CAGE 
 
 she should miss at Chalk Farm. She was 
 ingenious and uncandid, therefore, about 
 leaving the breadth of London a little longer 
 between herself and that austerity. If she 
 had not quite the courage, in short, to say 
 to Mr. Mudge that her actual chance for a 
 play of mind was worth, any week, the three 
 shillings he desired to help her to save, she 
 yet saw something happen in the course of 
 the month that, in her heart of hearts at 
 least, answered the subtle question. This 
 was connected precisely with the appearance 
 of the memorable lady.
 
 Ill 
 
 She pushed in three bescribbled forms 
 which the girl s hand was quick to appropri 
 ate, Mr. Buckton having so frequent a per 
 verse instinct for catching first any eye that 
 promised the sort of entertainment with 
 which she had her peculiar affinity. The 
 amusements of captives are full of a desper 
 ate contrivance, and one of our young 
 friend s ha penny worths had been the 
 charming tale of Picciola. It was of course 
 the law of the place that they were never to 
 take no notice, as Mr. Buckton said, whom 
 they served ; but this also never prevented, 
 certainly on the same gentleman s own part, 
 what he was fond of describing as the under 
 hand game. Both her companions, for that 
 matter, made no secret of the number of 
 favourites they had among the ladies ; sweet 
 familiarities in spite of which she had 
 
 repeatedly caught each of them in stupid- 
 13
 
 14 IN THE CAGE 
 
 ities and mistakes, confusions of identity and 
 lapses of observation that never failed to 
 remind her how the cleverness of men ended 
 where the cleverness of women began. 
 "Marguerite, Regent Street. Try on at six. 
 All Spanish lace. Pearls. The full length. 
 That was the first; it had no signature. 
 "Lady Agnes Orme, Hyde Park Place. 
 Impossible to-night, dining Haddon. Opera 
 to-morrow, promised Fritz, but could do play 
 Wednesday. Will try Haddon for Savoy, 
 and anything in the world you like, if you 
 can get Gussy. Sunday, Montenero. Sit 
 Mason Monday, Tuesday. Marguerite awful. 
 Cissy." That was the second. The third, 
 the girl noted when she took it, was on a 
 foreign form: "Everard, Hotel Brighton, 
 Paris. Only understand and believe. 22nd 
 to 26th, and certainly 8th and gth. Perhaps 
 others. Come. Mary." 
 
 Mary was very handsome, the handsomest 
 woman, she felt in a moment, she had ever 
 seen or perhaps it was only Cissy. Per 
 haps it was both, for she had seen stranger
 
 IN THE CAGE 15 
 
 things than that ladies wiring to different 
 persons under different names. She had 
 seen all sorts of things and pieced together 
 all sorts of mysteries. There had once been 
 one not long before who, without wink 
 ing, sent off five over five different signa 
 tures. Perhaps these represented five 
 different friends who had asked her all 
 women, just as perhaps now Mary and Cissy, 
 or one or other of them, were wiring by 
 deputy. Sometimes she put in too much 
 too much of her own sense; sometimes 
 she put in too little ; and in either case 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 devil 
 ish and successful subterfuges for keeping 
 her at the sounder whenever it looked as if 
 anything might amuse ; the sounder, which 
 it was equally his business to mind, being 
 the innermost cell of captivity, a cage within
 
 16 IN THE CAGE 
 
 the cage, fenced off 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 un 
 pleasant 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 splen 
 dour 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 con-
 
 IN THE CAGE 17 
 
 sideration 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 if she had 
 wished. How did our obscure little public 
 servant know that, for the lady of the tele 
 grams, 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 the nature of 
 the tie with the gentleman at the Hotel 
 Brighton? More than ever before it floated 
 to her through the bars of the cage that this 
 at last was the high reality, the bristling 
 truth that she had hitherto only patched up 
 and eked out one of the creatures, in fine, 
 in whom all the conditions for happiness 
 actually met and who, in the air they made, 
 bloomed with an unwitting insolence. What 
 came home to the girl was the way the 
 insolence was tempered by something that 
 was equally a part of the distinguished life,
 
 i8 IN THE CAGE 
 
 the custom of a flower-like bend to the less 
 fortunate a dropped fragrance, a mere 
 quick breath, but which in fact pervaded and 
 lingered. The apparition was very young, 
 but certainly married, and our fatigued 
 friend had a sufficient store of mythological 
 comparison to recognise the port of Juno. 
 Marguerite might be "awful," but she knew 
 how to dress a goddess. 
 
 Pearls and Spanish lace she herself, with 
 assurance, could see them, and the "full 
 length" too, and also red velvet bows, which, 
 disposed on the lace in a particular manner 
 (she could have placed them with the turn 
 of a hand), were of course to adorn the front 
 of a black brocade that would be like a dress 
 in a picture. However, neither Marguerite, 
 nor Lady Agnes, nor Haddon, nor Fritz, nor 
 Gussy were what the wearer of this garment 
 had really come in for. She had come in 
 for Everard and that was doubtless not his 
 true name either. If our young lady had 
 never taken such jumps before, it was 
 simply that she had never before been so
 
 IN THE CAGE 19 
 
 affected. She went all the way. Mary and 
 Cissy had been round together, in their 
 single superb person, to see him he must 
 live round the corner; they had found that, 
 in consequence of something they had come, 
 precisely, to make up for or to have another 
 scene about, he had gone off gone off just 
 on purpose to make them feel it; on which 
 they had come together to Cocker s as to 
 the nearest place; where they had put in 
 the three forms partly in order not to put in 
 the one alone. The two others, in a manner, 
 covered it, muffled it, passed it off. Oh yes, 
 she went all the way, and this was a speci 
 men of how she often went. She would 
 know the hand again any time. It was as 
 handsome and as everything else as the 
 woman herself. The woman herself had, on 
 learning his flight, pushed past Everard s 
 servant and into his room ; she had written 
 her missive at his table and with his pen. 
 All this, every inch of it, came in the waft 
 that she blew through and left behind her, 
 the influence that, as I have said, lingered.
 
 20 IN THE CAGE 
 
 And among the things the girl was sure 
 of, happily, was that she should see her 
 again.
 
 IV 
 
 She saw her in fact, and only ten days 
 later; but this time she was not alone, and 
 that was exactly a part of the luck of it. 
 Being clever enough to know through what 
 possibilities it could range, our young lady 
 had ever since had in her mind a dozen con 
 flicting theories about Everard s type; as to 
 which, the instant they came into the place, 
 she felt the point settled with a thump that 
 seemed somehow addressed straight to her 
 heart. That organ literally beat faster at 
 the approach of the gentleman who was this 
 time with Cissy and who, as seen from 
 within the cage, became on the spot the 
 happiest of the happy circumstances with 
 which her mind had invested the friend of 
 Fritz and Gussy. He was a very happy cir 
 cumstance indeed as, with his cigarette in 
 his lips and his broken familiar talk caught 
 by his companions, he put down the half-
 
 22 IN THE CAGE 
 
 dozen telegrams which it would take them 
 together some minutes to despatch. And 
 here it occurred, oddly enough, that if, 
 shortly before, the girl s interest in his com 
 panion had sharpened her sense for the 
 messages then transmitted, her immediate 
 vision of himself had the effect, while she 
 counted his seventy words, of preventing 
 intelligibility. His words were mere num 
 bers, they told her nothing whatever; and 
 after he had gone she was in possession of 
 no name, of no address, of no meaning, of 
 nothing but a vague, sweet sound and an 
 immense impression. He had been there 
 but five minutes, he had smoked in her face, 
 and, busy with his telegrams, with the tap 
 ping pencil and the conscious danger, the 
 odious betrayal that would come from a mis 
 take, she had had no wandering glances nor 
 roundabout arts to spare. Yet she had taken 
 him in ; she knew everything ; she had made 
 up her mind. 
 
 He had come back from Paris; everything 
 was rearranged ; the pair were again shoulder
 
 IN THE CAGE 23 
 
 to shoulder in their high encounter with life, 
 their large and complicated game. The fine, 
 soundless pulse of this game was in the air 
 for our young woman while they remained 
 in the shop. While they remained? They 
 remained all day, their presence continued 
 and abode with her, was in everything she 
 did till nightfall, in the thousands of other 
 words she counted, she transmitted, in all 
 the stamps she detached and the letters she 
 weighed and the change she gave, equally 
 unconscious and unerring in each of these 
 particulars, and not, as the run on the little 
 office thickened with the afternoon hours, 
 looking up at a single ugly face in the long 
 sequence, nor really hearing the stupid 
 questions that she patiently and perfectly 
 answered. All patience was possible now, 
 and all questions stupid after his all faces 
 ugly. She had been sure she should see the 
 lady again ; and even now she should per 
 haps, she should probably, see her often. 
 But for him it was totally different; she 
 should never, never see him. She wanted
 
 24 IN THE CAGE 
 
 it too much. There was a kind of wanting 
 that helped she had arrived, with her rich 
 exp rience, at that generalisation ; and there 
 was another kind that was fatal. It was 
 this time the fatal kind ; it would prevent. 
 
 Well, she saw him the very next day, and 
 on this second occasion it was quite differ 
 ent; the sense of every syllable he de 
 spatched was fiercely distinct; she indeed 
 felt her progressive pencil, dabbing as if 
 with a quick caress the marks of his own, 
 put life into every stroke. He was there a 
 long time had not brought his forms filled 
 out, but worked them off in a nook on the 
 counter; and there were other people as 
 well a changing, pushing cluster, with 
 every one to mind at once and endless right 
 change to make and information to produce. 
 But she kept hold of him throughout; she 
 continued, for herself, in a relation with 
 him as close as that in which, behind the 
 hated ground glass, Mr. Buckton luckily con 
 tinued with the sounder. This morning 
 everything changed, but with a kind of
 
 IN THE CAGE 25 
 
 dreariness too ; she had to swallow the rebuff 
 to her theory about fatal desires, which she 
 did without confusion and indeed with abso 
 lute levity; yet if it was now flagrant that 
 he did live close at hand at Park Cham 
 bers and belonged supremely to the class 
 that wired everything, even their expensive 
 feelings (so that, as he never wrote, his 
 correspondence cost him weekly pounds 
 and pounds, and he might be in and out five 
 times a day,) there was, all the same, 
 involved in the prospect, and by reason of 
 its positive excess of light, a perverse mel 
 ancholy, almost a misery. This was rapidly 
 to give it a place in an order of feelings on 
 which I shall presently touch. 
 
 Meanwhile, for a month, he was very con 
 stant. Cissy, Mary, never reappeared with 
 him ; he was always either alone or accom 
 panied only by some gentleman who was 
 lost in the blaze of his glory. There was 
 another sense, however and indeed there 
 was more than one in which she mostly 
 found herself counting in the splendid
 
 26 IN THE CAGE 
 
 creature with whom she had originally con 
 nected him. He addressed this correspond 
 ent neither as Mary nor as Cissy; but the 
 girl was sure of whom it was, in Eaton 
 Square, that he was perpetually wiring to 
 and so irreproachably! as Lady Bradeen. 
 Lady Bradeen was Cissy, Lady Bradeen was 
 Mary, Lady Bradeen was the friend of Fritz 
 and of Gussy, the customer of Marguerite 
 and the close ally, in short (as was ideally 
 right, only the girl had not yet found a 
 descriptive term that was,) of the most mag 
 nificent of men. Nothing could equal the 
 frequency and variety of his communica 
 tions to her ladyship but their extraordinary, 
 their abysmal propriety. It was just the 
 talk, so profuse sometimes that she wondered 
 what was left for their real meetings, of the 
 happiest people in the world. Their real 
 meetings must have been constant, for half 
 of it was appointments and allusions, all 
 swimming in a sea of other allusions still, 
 tangled in a complexity of questions that 
 gave a wondrous image of their life. If
 
 IN THE CAGE 27 
 
 Lady Bradeen was Juno, it was all certainly 
 Olympian. If the girl, missing the answers, 
 her ladyship s own outpourings, sometimes 
 wished that Cocker s had only been one of 
 the bigger offices where telegrams arrived 
 as well as departed, there were yet ways in 
 which, on the whole, she pressed the ro 
 mance closer by reason of the very quantity 
 of imagination that it demanded. The days 
 and hours of this new friend, as she came to 
 account him, were at all events unrolled, 
 and however much more she might have 
 known she would still have wished to go 
 beyond. In fact she did go beyond; she 
 went quite far enough. 
 
 But she could none the less, even after a 
 month, scarce have told if the gentlemen 
 who came in with him recurred or changed ; 
 and this in spite of the fact that they too 
 were always posting and wiring, smoking in 
 her face and signing or not signing. The 
 gentlemen who came in with him were noth 
 ing, at any rate, when he was there. They 
 turned up alone at other times then only
 
 28 IN THE CAGE 
 
 perhaps with a dim richness of reference. 
 He himself, absent as well as present, was 
 all. He was very tall, very fair, and had, 
 in spite of his thick preoccupations, a good- 
 humour that was exquisite, particularly as it 
 so often had the effect of keeping him on. 
 He could have reached over anybody, and 
 anybody no matter who would have let 
 him ; but he was so extraordinarily kind that 
 he quite pathetically waited, never waggling 
 things at her out of his turn or saying Here ! 
 with horrid sharpness. He waited for pot 
 tering old ladies, for gaping slaveys, for the 
 perpetual Buttonsesfrom Thrupp s; and the 
 thing in all this that she would have liked 
 most unspeakably to put to the test was the 
 possibility of her having for him a personal 
 identity that might in a particular way 
 appeal. There were moments when he 
 actually struck her as on her side, arranging 
 to help, to support, to spare her. 
 
 But such was the singular spirit of our 
 young friend that she could remind herself 
 with a sort of rage that when people had
 
 IN THE CAGE 29 
 
 awfully good manners people of that class 
 you couldn t tell. These manners were for 
 everybody, and it might be drearily unavail 
 ing for any poor particular body to be over 
 worked and unusual. What he did take for 
 granted was all sorts of facility ; and his high 
 pleasantness, his relighting of cigarettes 
 while he waited, his unconscious bestowal 
 of opportunities, of boons, of blessings, were 
 all a part of his magnificent security, the 
 instinct that told him there was nothing 
 such an existence as his could ever lose by. 
 He was, somehow, at once very bright and 
 very grave, very young and immensely com 
 plete ; and whatever he was at any moment, 
 it was always as much as all the rest the 
 mere bloom of his beatitude. He was some 
 times Everard, as he had been at the Hotel 
 Brighton, and he was sometimes Captain 
 Everard. He was sometimes Philip with 
 his surname and sometimes Philip without 
 it. In some directions he was merely Phil, 
 in others he was merely Captain. There 
 were relations in which he was none of these
 
 30 IN THE CAGE 
 
 things, but a quite different person the 
 Count. There were several friends for 
 whom he was William. There were several 
 for whom, in allusion perhaps to his com 
 plexion, he was the Pink Un. Once, 
 once only by good luck, he had, coinciding 
 comically, quite miraculously, with another 
 person also near to her, been Mudge. Yes, 
 whatever he was, it was a part of his hap 
 piness whatever he was and probably what 
 ever he wasn t. And his happiness was a 
 part it became so little by little of some 
 thing that, almost from the first of her being 
 at Cocker s, had been deeply with the girl.
 
 This was neither more nor less than the 
 queer extension of her experience, the double 
 life that, in the cage, she grew at last to 
 lead. As the weeks went on there she lived 
 more and more into the world of whiffs and 
 glimpses, and found her divinations work 
 faster and stretch further. It was a pro 
 digious view as the pressure heightened, a 
 panorama fed with facts and figures, flushed 
 with a torrent of color and accompanied with 
 wondrous world-music. What it mainly 
 came to at this period was a picture of how 
 London could amuse itself; and that, with 
 the running commentary of a witness so 
 exclusively a witness, turned for the most 
 part to a hardening of the heart. The nose 
 of this observer was brushed by the bouquet, 
 yet she could never really pluck even a daisy. 
 What could still remain fresh in her daily 
 
 grind was the immense disparity, the differ- 
 31
 
 32 IN THE CAGE 
 
 ence and contrast, from class to class, of 
 every instant and every motion. There 
 were times when all the wires in the country 
 seemed to start from the little hole-and- 
 corner where she plied for a livelihood, and 
 where, in the shuffle of feet, the flutter of 
 forms, the straying of stamps and the ring 
 of change over the counter, the people she 
 had fallen into the habit of remembering 
 and fitting together with others, and of 
 having her theories and interpretations of, 
 kept up before her their long procession and 
 rotation. What twisted the knife in her 
 vitals was the way the profligate rich scat 
 tered about them, in extravagant chatter 
 over their extravagant pleasures and sins, 
 an amount of money that would have held 
 the stricken household of her frightened 
 childhood, her poor pinched mother and tor 
 mented father and lost brother and starved 
 sister, together for a lifetime. During her 
 first weeks she had often gasped at the 
 sums people were willing to pay for the stuff 
 they transmitted the much loves, the
 
 IN THE CAGE 33 
 
 awful regrets, the compliments and won 
 derments and vain, vague gestures that cost 
 the price of a new pair of boots. She had 
 had a way then of glancing at the people s 
 faces, but she had early learned that if you 
 became a telegraphist you soon ceased to be 
 astonished. Her eye for types amounted 
 nevertheless to genius, and there were those 
 she liked and those, she hated, her feeling 
 for the latter of which grew to a positive 
 possession, an instinct of observation arid 
 detection. There were the brazen women, as 
 she called them, of the higher and the lower 
 fashion, whose squanderings and graspings, 
 whose struggles and secrets and love-affairs 
 and lies she tracked and stored up against 
 them, till she had at moments, in private, a 
 triumphant, vicious feeling of mastery and 
 power, a sense of having their silly, guilty 
 secrets in her pocket, her small retentive 
 brain, and thereby knowing so much more 
 about them than they suspected or would 
 care to think. There were those she would 
 have liked to betray, to trip up, to bring
 
 34 IN THE CAGE 
 
 down with words altered and fatal ; and all 
 through a personal hostility provoked by the 
 lightest signs, by their accidents of tone and 
 manner, by the particular kind of relation 
 she always happened instantly to feel. 
 
 There were impulses of various kinds, 
 alternately soft and severe, to which she was 
 constitutionally accessible and which were 
 determined by the smallest accidents. She 
 was rigid, in general, on the article of mak 
 ing the public itself affix its stamps, and 
 found a special enjoyment in dealing, to that 
 end, with some of the ladies who were too 
 grand to touch them. She had thus a play 
 of refinement and subtlety greater, she flat 
 tered herself, than any of which she could 
 be made the subject; and though most peo 
 ple were too stupid to be conscious of this, 
 it brought her endless little consolations and 
 revenges. She recognised quite as much 
 those of her sex whom she would have liked 
 to help, to warn, to rescue, to see more of; 
 and that alternative as well operated exactly 
 through the hazard of personal sympathy,
 
 IN THE CAGE 35 
 
 her vision for silver threads and moonbeams 
 and her gift for keeping the clues and find 
 ing her way in the tangle. The moonbeams 
 and silver threads presented at moments all 
 the vision of what poor she might have made 
 of happiness. Blurred and blank as the 
 whole thing often inevitably, or mercifully, 
 became, she could still, through crevices and 
 crannies, be stupified, especially by what, 
 in spite of all seasoning, touched the sorest 
 place in her consciousness, the revelation of 
 the golden shower flying about without a 
 gleam of gold for herself. It remained pro 
 digious to the end, the money her fine friends 
 were able to spend to get still more, or even 
 to complain to fine friends of their own that 
 they were in want. The pleasures they pro 
 posed were equalled only by those they 
 declined, and they made their appointments 
 often so expensively that she was left won 
 dering at the nature of the delights to which 
 the mere approaches were so paved with 
 shillings. She quivered on occasion into the 
 perception of this and that one whom she
 
 36 IN THE CAGE 
 
 would, at all events, have just simply liked 
 to be. Her conceit, her baffled vanity were 
 possibly monstrous ; she certainly often threw 
 herself into a defiant conviction that she 
 would have done the whole thing much 
 better. But her greatest comfort, on the 
 whole, was her comparative vision of the 
 men ; by whom I mean the unmistakable gen 
 tlemen, for she had no interest in the spurious 
 or the shabby, and no mercy at all for the 
 poor. She could have found a sixpence, out 
 side, for an appearance of want; but her 
 fancy, in some directions so alert, had never 
 a throb of response for any sign of the sordid. 
 The men she did follow, moreover, she fol 
 lowed mainly in one relation, the relation as 
 to which the cage convinced her, she be- 
 .lieved, more than anything else could have 
 done, that it was quite the most diffused. 
 
 She found her ladies, in short, almost 
 always in communication with her gentle 
 men, and her gentlemen with her ladies, and 
 she read into the immensity of their inter 
 course stories and meanings without end.
 
 IN THE CAGE 37 
 
 Incontestibly she grew to think that the men 
 cut the best figure ; and in this particular, 
 as in many others, she arrived at a philos 
 ophy of her own, all made up of her private 
 notations and cynicisms. It was a striking 
 part of the business, for example, that it was 
 much more the women, on the whole, who 
 were after the men than the men who were 
 after the women ; it was literally visible that 
 the general attitude of the one sex was that 
 of the object pursued and defensive, apolo 
 getic and attenuating, while the light of her 
 own nature helped her more or less to con 
 clude as to the attitude of the other. Per 
 haps she herself a little even fell into the 
 custom of pursuit in occasionally deviating 
 only for gentlemen from her high rigour 
 about the stamps. She had early in the day 
 made up her mind, in fine, that they had the 
 best manners; and if there were none of 
 them she noticed when Captain Everard was 
 there, there were plenty she could place and 
 trace and name at other times, plenty who, 
 with their way of being nice to her, and of
 
 38 IN THE CAGE 
 
 handling, as if their pockets were private 
 tills, loose, mixed masses of silver and gold, 
 were such pleasant appearances that she 
 could envy them without dislike. They 
 never had to give change they only had to 
 get it. They ranged through every sugges 
 tion, every shade of fortune, which evidently 
 included indeed lots of bad luck as well as of 
 good, declining even toward Mr. Mudge and 
 his bland, firm thrift, and ascending, in wild 
 signals and rocket-flights, almost to within 
 hail of her highest standard. So, from month 
 to month, she went on with them all, through 
 a thousand ups and downs and a thousand 
 pangs and indifferences. What virtually hap 
 pened was that in the shuffling herd that 
 passed before her by far the greater part only 
 passed a proportion but just appreciable 
 stayed. Most of the elements swam straight 
 away, lost themselves in the bottomless com 
 mon, and by so doing really kept the page 
 clear. On the clearness, therefore, what she 
 did retain stood sharply out ; she nipped and 
 caught it, turned it over and interwove it.
 
 VI 
 
 She met Mrs. Jordan whenever she could, 
 and learned from her more and more how 
 the great people, under her gentle shake, 
 and after going through everything with the 
 mere shops, were waking up to the gain of 
 putting into the hands of a person of real 
 refinement the question that the shop-people 
 spoke of so vulgarly as that of the floral 
 decorations. The regular dealers in these 
 decorations were all very well; but there 
 was a peculiar magic in the play of taste of 
 a lady who had only to remember, through 
 whatever intervening dusk, all her own little 
 tables, little bowls and little jars and little 
 other arrangements, and the wonderful thing 
 she had made of the garden of the vicarage. 
 This small domain, which her young friend 
 had never seen, bloomed in Mrs. Jordan s 
 discourse like a new Eden, and she con 
 verted the past into a bank of violets by the 
 
 39
 
 40 IN THE CAGE 
 
 tone in which she said, Of course you always 
 knew my one passion! She obviously met 
 now, at any rate, a big contemporary need, 
 measured what it was rapidly becoming for 
 people to feel they could trust her without a 
 tremor. It brought them a peace that 
 during the quarter of an hour before dinner 
 in especial was worth more to them than 
 mere payment could express. Mere pay 
 ment, none the less, was tolerably prompt ; 
 she engaged by the month, taking over the 
 whole thing; and there was an evening on 
 which, in respect to our heroine, she at last 
 returned to the charge. It s growing and 
 growing, and I see that I must really divide 
 the work. One wants an associate of one s 
 own kind, don t you know? You know the 
 look they want it all to have? of having 
 come, not from a florist, but from one of 
 themselves. Well, I m sure you could give 
 it because you are one. Then we should 
 win. Therefore just come in with me. 
 
 And leave the P. O.? 
 
 Let the P. O. simply bring you your
 
 IN THE CAGE 41 
 
 letters. It would bring you lots, you d see; 
 orders, after a bit, by the dozen. It was 
 on this, in due course, that the great advan 
 tage again came up : One seems to live again 
 with one s own people. It had taken some 
 little time (after their having parted com 
 pany in the tempest of their troubles and 
 then, in the glimmering dawn, finally sighted 
 each other again) for each to admit that the 
 other was, in her private circle, her only 
 equal ; but the admission came, when it did 
 come, with an honest groan, and since 
 equality was named each found much per 
 sonal profit in exaggerating the other s origi 
 nal grandeur. Mrs. Jordan was ten years the 
 older, but her young friend was struck with 
 the smaller difference this now made ; it had 
 counted otherwise at the time when, much 
 more as a friend of her mother s, the be 
 reaved lady, without a penny of provision, 
 and with stopgaps, like their own, all gone, 
 had, across the sordid landing on which the 
 opposite doors of the pair of scared miseries 
 opened and to which they were bewilderedly
 
 42 IN THE CAGE 
 
 bolted, borrowed coals and umbrellas that 
 were repaid in potatoes and postage-stamps. 
 It had been a questionable help, at that time, 
 to ladies submerged, floundering, panting, 
 swimming for their lives, that they were 
 ladies ; but such an advantage could come up 
 again in proportion as others vanished, and 
 it had grown very great by the time it was 
 the only ghost of one they possessed. They 
 had literally watched it take to itself a por 
 tion of the substance of each that had de 
 parted ; and it became prodigious now, when 
 they could talk of it together, when they 
 could look back at it across a desert of 
 accepted derogation, and when, above all, 
 they could draw from each other a credulity 
 about it that they could draw from no one 
 else. Nothing was really so marked as that 
 they felt the need to cultivate this legend 
 much more after having found their feet and 
 stayed their stomachs in the ultimate obscure 
 than they had done in the upper air of mere 
 frequent shocks. The thing they could now 
 oftenest say to each other was that they
 
 IN THE CAGE 43 
 
 knew what they meant, and the sentiment 
 with which, all round, they knew it was 
 known had been a kind of promise to stick 
 well together again. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan was at present fairly dazzling 
 on the subject of the way that, in the practice 
 of her beautiful art, she more than peeped 
 in she penetrated. There was not a house 
 of the great kind and it was, of course, 
 only a question of those real homes of lux 
 ury in which she was not, at the rate such 
 people now had things, all over the place. 
 The girl felt before the picture the cold 
 breath of disinheritance as much as she had 
 ever felt it in the cage; she knew, more 
 over, how much she betrayed this, for the 
 experience of poverty had begun, in her life, 
 too early, and her ignorance of the require 
 ments of homes of luxury had grown, with 
 other active knowledge, a depth of simpli 
 fication. She had accordingly at first often 
 found that in these colloquies she could only 
 pretend she understood. Educated as she 
 had rapidly been by her chances at Cocker s
 
 44 IN THE CAGE 
 
 there were still strange gaps in her learning 
 she could never, like Mrs. Jordan, have 
 found her way about one of the homes. 
 Little by little, however, she had caught on, 
 above all in the light of what Mrs. Jordan s 
 redemption had materially made of that 
 lady, giving her, though the years and the 
 struggles had naturally not straightened a 
 feature, an almost super-eminent air. There 
 were women in and out of Cocker s who 
 were quite nice and who yet didn t look well ; 
 whereas Mrs. Jordan looked well and yet, 
 with her extraordinarily protrusive teeth, 
 was by no means quite nice. It would seem, 
 mystifyingly, that it might really come from 
 all the greatness she could live with. It was 
 fine to hear her talk so often of dinners of 
 twenty and of her doing, as she said, exactly 
 as she liked with them. She spoke as if, for 
 that matter, she invited the company. 
 They simply give me the table all the rest, 
 all the other effects, come afterwards.
 
 VII 
 
 Then you do see them? the girl again 
 asked. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan hesitated, and indeed the 
 point had been ambiguous before. Do you 
 mean the guests? 
 
 Her young friend, cautious about an 
 undue exposure of innocence, was not quite 
 sure. Well the people who live there. 
 
 Lady Ventnor? Mrs. Bubb? Lord Rye? 
 Dear, yes. Why, they like one. 
 
 But does one personally know them? our 
 young lady went on, since that was the way 
 to speak. I mean socially, don t you know ? 
 as you know me. 
 
 They re not so nice as you! Mrs. Jordan 
 charmingly cried. But I shall see more and 
 more of them. 
 
 Ah, this was the old story. But how 
 soon? 
 
 Why, almost any day. Of course, Mrs. 
 
 45
 
 46 IN THE CAGE 
 
 Jordan honestly added, they re nearly 
 always out. 
 
 Then why do they want flowers all over? 
 
 Oh, that doesn t make any difference. 
 Mrs. Jordan was not philosophic; she was 
 only evidently determined it shouldn t make 
 any. They re awfully interested in my 
 ideas, and it s inevitable they should meet 
 me over them. 
 
 Her interlocutress was sturdy enough. 
 
 What do you call your ideas? 
 
 Mrs. Jordan s reply was fine. If you 
 were to see me some day with a thousand 
 tulips, you d soon discover. 
 
 A thousand? the girl gasped at such a 
 revelation of the scale of it; she felt, for 
 the instant, fairly planted out. Well, but 
 if in fact they never do meet you? she none 
 the less pessimistically insisted. 
 
 Never? They often do and evidently 
 quite on purpose. We have grand long 
 talks. 
 
 There was something in our young lady 
 that could still stay her from asking for a
 
 IN THE CAGE 47 
 
 personal description of these apparitions; 
 that showed too starved a state. But while 
 she considered she took in afresh the whole 
 of the clergyman. s widow. Mrs.^ Jordan 
 couldn t help her teeth, and her sleeves 
 were a distinct rise in the world. A thou 
 sand tulips at a shilling clearly took one 
 further than a thousand words at a penny ; 
 and the betrothed of Mr. Mudge, in whom 
 the sense of the race for life was always 
 acute, found herself wondering, with a 
 twinge of her easy jealousy, if it mightn t 
 after all then, for her also, be better better 
 than where she was to follow some such 
 scent. Where she was was where Mr. Buck- 
 ton s elbow could freely enter her right side 
 and the counter-clerk s breathing he had 
 something the matter with his nose pervade 
 her left ear. It was something to fill an office 
 under government, and she knew but too 
 well there were places commoner still than 
 Cocker s; but it never required much of a 
 chance to bring back to her the picture of 
 servitude and promiscuity that she must
 
 48 IN THE CAGE 
 
 present to the eye of comparative freedom. 
 She was so boxed up with her young men, 
 and anything like a margin so absent, that it 
 needed more art than she should ever possess 
 to pretend in the least to compass, with any 
 one in the nature of an acquaintance say 
 with Mrs. Jordan herself, flying in, as it 
 might happen, to wire sympathetically to 
 Mrs. Bubb an approach to a relation of 
 elegant privacy. She remembered the day 
 when Mrs. Jordan had, in fact, by the great 
 est chance, come in with fifty-three words 
 for Lord Rye and a five-pound note to 
 change. This had been the dramatic man 
 ner of their reunion their mutual recogni 
 tion was so great an event. The girl could 
 at first only see her from the waist up, 
 besides making but little of her long tele 
 gram 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,
 
 IN THE CAGE 49 
 
 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 sharp 
 ness of triumph it might even have been 
 called, that fell upon her at this moment and 
 avenged her for the incoherency of the 
 message, an unintelligible enumeration of 
 numbers, colors, days, hours. The corres 
 pondence 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
 
 5 o IN THE CAGE 
 
 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 unmistakably 
 low, Handsome woman! she had for him 
 the finest of her chills: She s the widow 
 of a bishop. She alwa}>-s felt, with the 
 counter-clerk, that it was impossible suf- 
 ficently 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 ap 
 proaches 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: Should I see them? I 
 mean if I were to give up everything for you. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan at this became most arch. 
 I d send you to all the bachelors! 
 
 Our young lady could be reminded by such 
 a remark that she usually struck her friend 
 as pretty. Do//z<?>/have their flowers?
 
 IN THE CAGE 51 
 
 Oceans. And they re the most particu 
 lar. Oh, it was a wonderful world. You 
 should see Lord Rye s. 
 
 His flowers? 
 
 Yes, and his letters. He writes me pages 
 on pages with the most adorable little 
 drawings and plans. You should see his 
 diagrams!
 
 r 1
 
 VIII 
 
 The girl had in course of time every 
 opportunity to inspect these documents, and 
 they a little disappointed her; but in the 
 meanwhile there had been more talk, and it 
 had led to her saying, as if her friend s 
 guarantee of a life of elegance were not 
 quite definite: "Well, I see every one at my 
 place. 
 
 Every one? 
 
 Lots of swells. They flock. They live, 
 you know, all round, and the place is filled 
 with all the smart people, all the fast people, 
 those whose names are in the papers mam 
 ma has still the Morning Post and who 
 come up for the season. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan took this in with complete 
 intelligence. Yes, and I dare say it s some 
 of your people that / do. 
 
 Her companion assented, but discrim 
 inated. I doubt if you "do" them as much 
 
 53
 
 54 IN THE CAGE 
 
 as I ! Their affairs, their appointments and 
 arrangements, their little games and secrets 
 and vices those things all pass before me. 
 
 This was a picture that could, impose on 
 a clergyman s widow a certain strain; it was 
 in intention, moreover, something of a retort 
 to the thousand tulips. Their vices? Have 
 they got vices? 
 
 Our young critic even more remarkably 
 stared; then with a touch of contempt in 
 her amusement: Haven t you found that 
 out? The homes of luxury, then, hadn t so 
 much to give. / find out everything, she 
 continued. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan, at bottom a very meek 
 person, was visibly struck. I see. You 
 do "have" them. 
 
 Oh, I don t care! Much good does it do me! 
 
 Mrs. Jordan, after an instant, recovered 
 her superiority. No it doesn t lead to 
 much. Her own initiations so clearly did. 
 Still after all; and she was not jealous: 
 There must be a charm. 
 
 In seeing them? At this the girl sud-
 
 IN THE CAGE 55 
 
 denly let herself go. I hate them; there s 
 that charm! 
 
 Mrs. Jordan gaped again. The real 
 "smarts"? 
 
 Is that what you call Mrs. Bubb? Yes 
 it comes to me; I ve had Mrs. Bubb. I 
 don t think she has been in herself, but 
 there are things her maid has brought. 
 Well, my dear! and the young person from 
 Cocker s, recalling these things and summing 
 them up, seemed suddenly to have much to 
 say. But she didn t say it; she checked it; 
 she only brought out: Her maid, who s 
 horrid she must have her ! Then she went 
 on with indifference: They re too real! 
 They re selfish brutes. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan, turning it over, adopted at 
 last the plan of treating it with a smile. She 
 wished to be liberal. Well, of course, they 
 do lay it out. 
 
 They bore me to death, her companion 
 pursued with slightly more temperance. 
 
 But this was going too far. 4 Ah, that s 
 because you ve no sympathy!
 
 56 IN THE CAGE 
 
 The girl gave an ironic laugh, only retort 
 ing that she wouldn t have any either if she 
 had to count all day all the words in the 
 dictionary; a contention Mrs. Jordan quite 
 granted, the more that she shuddered at the 
 notion of ever failing of the very gift to 
 which she owed the vogue the rage she 
 might call it that had caught her up. 
 Without sympathy or without imagination, 
 for it came back again to that how should 
 she get, for big dinners, down the middle 
 and toward the far corners at all? It wasn t 
 the combinations, which were easily man 
 aged : the strain was over the ineffable sim 
 plicities, those that the bachelors above all, 
 and Lord Rye perhaps most of any, threw 
 off just blew off, like cigarette-puffs such 
 sketches of. The betrothed of Mr. Mudge 
 at all events accepted the explanation, which 
 had the effect, as almost any turn of their 
 talk was now apt to have, of bringing her 
 round to the terrific question of that gentle 
 man. She was tormented with the desire to 
 get out of Mrs. Jordan, on this subject, what
 
 IN THE CAGE 57 
 
 she was sure was at the back of Mrs. Jor 
 dan s head; and to get it out of her, queerly 
 enough, if only to vent a certain irritation 
 at it. She knew that what her friend would 
 already have risked if she had not been 
 timid and tortuous was : Give him up yes, 
 give him up : you ll see that with your sure 
 chances you ll be able to do much better. 
 Our young woman had a sense that if that 
 view could only be put before her with a 
 particular sniff for poor Mr. Mudge she 
 should hate it as much as she morally ought. 
 She was conscious of not, as yet, hating it 
 quite so much as that. But she saw that 
 Mrs. Jordan was conscious of something 
 too, and that there was a sort of assurance 
 she was waiting little by little to gather. 
 The day came when the girl caught a 
 glimpse of what was still wanting to make 
 her friend feel strong; which was nothing 
 less than the prospect of being able to 
 announce the climax of sundry private 
 dreams. The associate of the aristocracy 
 had personal calculations she pored over
 
 58 IN THE CAGE 
 
 them in her lonely lodgings. If she did the 
 flowers for the bachelors, in short, didn t she 
 expect that to have consequences very differ 
 ent from the outlook, at Cocker s, that she 
 had described as leading to nothing? There 
 seemed in very truth something auspicious 
 in the mixture of bachelors and flowers, 
 though, when looked hard in the eye, Mrs. 
 Jordan was not quite prepared to say she 
 had expected a positive proposal from Lord 
 Rye to pop out of it. Our young woman 
 arrived at last, none the less, at a definite 
 vision of what was in her mind. This was 
 a vivid foreknowledge that the betrothed of 
 Mr. Mudge would, unless conciliated in 
 advance by a successful rescue, almost hate 
 her on the day she should break a particular 
 piece of news. How could that unfortunate 
 otherwise endure to hear of what, under the 
 protection of Lady Ventnor, was after all so 
 possible?
 
 IX 
 
 Meanwhile, since irritation sometimes 
 relieved her, the betrothed of Mr. Mudge 
 drew straight from that admirer an amount 
 of it that was proportioned to her fidelity. 
 She always walked with him on Sundays, 
 usually in the Regent s Park, and quite 
 often, once or twice a month, he took her, 
 in the Strand or thereabouts, to see a piece 
 that was having a run. The productions he 
 always preferred were the really good ones 
 Shakespeare, Thompson or some funny 
 American thing; which, as it also happened 
 that she hated vulgar plays, gave him ground 
 for what was almost the fondest of his 
 approaches, the theory that their tastes 
 were, blissfully, just the same. He was for 
 ever reminding her of that, rejoicing over 
 it, and being affectionate and wise about it. 
 
 There were times when she wondered how 
 in the world she could bear him, how she 
 
 59
 
 60 IN THE CAGE 
 
 could bear any man so smugly unconscious 
 of the immensity of her difference. It was 
 just for this difference that, if she was to be 
 liked at all, she wanted to be liked, and if 
 that was not the source of Mr. Mudge s 
 admiration, she asked herself, what on earth 
 could be? She was not different only at one 
 point, she was different all round; unless 
 perhaps indeed in being practically human, 
 which her mind just barely recognised that 
 he also was. She would have made tremen 
 dous concessions in other quarters: there 
 was no limit, for instance, to those she would 
 have made to Captain Everard ; but what I 
 have named was the most she was prepared 
 to do for Mr. Mudge. It was because he 
 was different that, in the oddest way, she 
 liked as well as deplored him; which was 
 after all a proof that the disparity, should 
 they frankly recognise it, wouldn t neces 
 sarily be fatal. She felt that, oleaginous 
 too oleaginous as he was, he was somehow 
 comparatively primitive: she had once, 
 during the portion of his time at Cocker s
 
 IN THE CAGE 61 
 
 that had overlapped her own, seen him 
 collar *a drunken soldier, a big, violent man, 
 who, having come in with a mate to get a 
 postal-order cashed, had made a grab at the 
 money before his friend could reach it and 
 had so produced, among the hams and 
 cheeses and the lodgers from Thrupp s, 
 reprisals instantly ensuing, a scene of scan 
 dal and consternation. Mr. Buckton and the 
 counter-clerk had crouched within the cage, 
 but Mr. Mudge had, with a very quiet but 
 very quick slep round the counter, trium 
 phantly interposed in the scrimmage, parted 
 the combatants and shaken the delinquent 
 in his skin. She had been proud of him at 
 that moment and had felt that if their affair 
 had not already been settled the neatness 
 of his execution would have left her with 
 out resistance. 
 
 Their affair had been settled by other 
 things: by the evident sincerity of his passion 
 and by the sense that his high white apron 
 resembled a front of many floors. It had 
 gone a great way with her that he would
 
 62 IN THE CAGE 
 
 build up a business to his chin, which 
 he carried quite in the air. This could 
 only be a question of time ; he would have 
 all Piccadilly in the pen behind his ear. 
 That was a merit in itself for a girl who had 
 known what she had known. There were 
 hours at which she even found him good- 
 looking, though, frankly, there could be no 
 crown for her effort to imagine, on the part 
 of the tailor or the barber, some such treat 
 ment of his appearance as would make him 
 resemble even remotely a gentleman. His 
 very beauty was the beauty of a grocer, and 
 the finest future would offer it none too much 
 room to expand. She had engaged herself, 
 in short, to the perfection of a type, and 
 perfection of anything was much for a per 
 son who, out of early troubles, had just 
 escaped with her life. But it contributed 
 hugely at present to carry on the two paral 
 lel lines of her contacts in the cage and her 
 contacts out of it. After keeping quiet for 
 some time about this opposition she sud 
 denly one Sunday afternoon on a penny
 
 IN THE CAGE 63 
 
 chair in the Regent s Park broke, for him, 
 capriciously, bewilderingly, into an intima 
 tion of what it came to. He naturally pressed 
 more and more on the subject of her again 
 placing herself where he could see her 
 hourly, and for her to recognise that since 
 she had as yet given him no sane reason for 
 delay she had no need to hear him say that 
 he couldn t make out what she was up to. As 
 if, with her absurd bad reasons, she knew it 
 herself! Sometimes she thought it would 
 be amusing to let him have them full in the 
 face, for she felt she should die of him unless 
 she once in a while stupefied him ; and some 
 times she thought it would be disgusting and 
 perhaps even fatal. She liked him, how 
 ever, to think her silly, for that gave her the 
 margin which, at the best, she would always 
 require; and the only difficulty about this 
 was that he hadn t enough imagination to 
 oblige her. It produced, none the less, 
 something of the desired effect to leave him 
 simply wondering why, over the matter of 
 their reunion, she didn t yield to his argu-
 
 64 IN THE CAGE 
 
 ments. Then at last, simply as if by acci 
 dent and out of mere boredom on a day that 
 was rather flat, she preposterously produced 
 her own. Well, wait a bit. Where I am I 
 still see things. And she talked to him 
 even worse, if possible, than she had talked 
 to Mrs. Jordan. 
 
 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 aston 
 ished nor angry. Oh, the British trades 
 man 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 
 upon 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
 
 IN THE CAGE 65 
 
 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 fancy 
 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 
 connection. That was the most he could 
 see in any picture of her keeping in 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 dis 
 covered, she reduced him to the particular 
 confusion in which he could still be amusing 
 to her.
 
 X 
 
 They re the most awful wretches, I assure 
 you the lot all about there. 
 
 Then why do you want to stay among 
 them? 
 
 My dear man, just because they are. It 
 makes me hate them so. 
 
 Hate them? I thought you liked them. 
 
 Don t be stupid. What I "like" is just 
 to loathe them. You wouldn t believe what 
 passes before my eyes. 
 
 Then why have you never told me? You 
 didn t mention anything before I left. 
 
 Oh, I hadn t got into it then. It s the 
 sort of thing you don t believe at first; you 
 have to look round you a bit and then you 
 understand. You work into it more and 
 more. Besides, the girl went on, this is 
 the time of the year when the worst lot come 
 up. They re simply packed together in 
 
 those smart streets. Talk of the numbers 
 67
 
 68 IN THE CAGE 
 
 of the poor! What / can vouch for is the 
 numbers of the rich ! There are new ones 
 every day, and they seem to get richer and 
 richer. Oh, they do come up! she cried, 
 imitating, for her private recreation she 
 was sure it wouldn t reach Mr. Mudge the 
 low intonation of the counter-clerk. 
 
 And where do they come from? her com 
 panion candidly inquired. 
 
 She had to think a moment; then she 
 found something. From the "spring meet 
 ings. " They bet tremendously. 
 
 Well, they bet enough at Chalk Farm, if 
 that s all. 
 
 It isn t all. It isn t a millionth part! she 
 replied with some sharpness. It s immense 
 fun she would tantalise him. Then, as she 
 had heard Mrs. Jordan say, and as the 
 ladies at Cockers even sometimes wired, It s 
 quite too dreadful! She could fully feel 
 how it was Mr. Mudge s propriety, which 
 was extreme he had a horror of coarseness 
 and attended a Wesleyan chapel that pre 
 vented his asking for details. But she gave
 
 IN THE CAGE 69 
 
 him some of the more innocuous in spite of 
 himself, especially putting before him how, 
 at Simpkin s and Ladle s, they all made the 
 money fly. That was indeed what he liked 
 to hear : the connection was not direct, but 
 one was somehow more in the right place 
 where the money was flying than where it 
 was simply and meagrely nesting. It 
 enlivened the air, he had to acknowledge, 
 much less at Chalk Farm than in the dis 
 trict in which his beloved so oddly enjoyed 
 her footing. She gave him, she could see, 
 a restless sense that these might be familiari 
 ties not to be sacrificed; germs, possibilities, 
 faint foreshowings heaven knew what 
 of the initiation it would prove profitable to 
 have arrived at when, in the fulness of time, 
 he should have his own shop in some such 
 paradise. What really touched him that 
 was discernible was that she could feed him 
 with so much mere vividness of reminder, 
 keep before him, as by the play of a fan, the 
 very wind of the swift banknotes and the 
 charm of the existence of a class that Provi-
 
 7 o IN THE CAGE 
 
 dence had raised up to be the blessing of 
 grocers. He liked to think that the class was 
 there, that it was always there, and that she 
 contributed in her slight but appreciable 
 degree to keep it up to the mark. He 
 couldn t have formulated his theory of the 
 matter, but the exuberance of the aristocracy 
 was the advantage of trade, and everything 
 was knit together in a richness of pattern 
 that it was good to follow with one s finger 
 tips. It was a comfort to him to be thus 
 assured that there were no symptoms of a 
 drop. What did the sounder, as she called 
 it, nimbly worked, do but keep the ball 
 going? 
 
 What it came to, therefore, for Mr. Mudge, 
 was that all enjoyments were, in short, 
 inter-related, and that the more people had 
 the more they wanted to have. The more 
 flirtations, as he might roughly express it, 
 the more cheese and pickles. He had even 
 in his own small way been dimly struck with 
 the concatenation between the tender passion 
 and cheap champagne. What he would have
 
 IN THE CAGE 71 
 
 liked to say had he been able to work out his 
 thought to the end was: I see, I see. Lash 
 them up then, lead them on, keep them 
 going: some of it can t help, some time, 
 coming our way. Yet he was troubled by 
 the suspicion of subtleties on his companion s 
 part that spoiled the straight view. He 
 couldn t understand people s hating what 
 they liked or liking what they hated ; above 
 all it hurt him somewhere for he had his 
 private delicacies to see anything but money 
 made out of his betters. To be curious at 
 the expense of the gentry was vaguely 
 wrong; the only thing that was distinctly 
 right was to be prosperous. Wasn t it just 
 because they were up there aloft that they 
 were lucrative? He concluded, at any rate, 
 by saying to his young friend: If it s im 
 proper for you to remain at Cocker s, then 
 that falls in exactly with the other reasons 
 that I have put before you for your removal. 
 Improper? her smile became a long, 
 wide look at him. My dear boy, there s no 
 one like you!
 
 72 IN THE CAGE 
 
 I dare say, he laughed; but that doesn t 
 help the question. 
 
 Well, she returned, I can t give up my 
 friends. I m making even more than Mrs. 
 Jordan. 
 
 Mr. Mudge considered. How much is she 
 making? 
 
 Oh, you dear donkey! and, regardless 
 of all the Regent s Park, she patted his 
 cheek. This was the sort of moment at 
 which she was absolutely tempted to tell 
 him that she liked to be near Park Chambers. 
 There was a fascination in the idea of see 
 ing if, on a mention of Captain Everard, he 
 wouldn t do what she thought he might; 
 wouldn t weigh against the obvious objec 
 tion the still more obvious advantage. The 
 advantage, of course, could only strike 
 him at the best as rather fantastic; but it 
 was always to the good to keep hold when 
 you had hold, and such an attitude would 
 also after all involve a high tribute to her 
 fidelity. Of one thing she absolutely never 
 doubted : Mr. Mudge believed in her with a
 
 IN THE CAGE 73 
 
 belief ! She believed in herself, too, for 
 that matter: if there was a thing in the 
 world no one could charge her with, it was 
 being the kind of low barmaid person who 
 rinsed tumblers and bandied slang. But 
 she forbore as yet to speak; she had not 
 spoken even to Mrs. Jordan ; and the hush 
 that on her lips surrounded the Captain s 
 name maintained itself as a kind of symbol 
 of the success that, up to this time, had 
 attended something or other she couldn t 
 have said what that she humoured herself 
 with calling, without words, her relation 
 with him.
 
 XI 
 
 She would have admitted indeed that it 
 consisted of little more than the fact that his 
 absences, however frequent and however 
 long, always ended with his turning up 
 again. It was nobody s business in the 
 world but her own if that fact continued to 
 be enough for her. It was of course not 
 enough just in itself; what it had taken on 
 to make it so was the extraordinary posses 
 sion of the elements of his life that memory 
 and attention had at last given her. There 
 came a day when this possession, on the 
 girl s part, actually seemed to enjoy, between 
 them, while their eyes met, a tacit recogni 
 tion that was half a joke and half a deep 
 solemnity. He bade her good-morning 
 always now ; he often quite raised his hat to 
 her. He passed a remark when there was 
 time or room, and once she went so far as 
 to say to him that she had not seen him for 
 
 75
 
 76 IN THE CAGE 
 
 ages. Ages was the word she consciously 
 and carefully, though a trifle tremulously, 
 used; ages was exactly what she meant. 
 To this he replied in terms doubtless less 
 anxiously selected, but perhaps on that 
 account not the less remarkable, Oh yes, 
 hasn t it been awfully wet? That was a 
 specimen of their give and take ; it fed her 
 fancy that no form of intercourse so tran 
 scendent and distilled had ever been estab 
 lished on earth. Everything, so far as they 
 chose to consider it so, might mean almost 
 anything. The want of margin in the cage, 
 when he peeped through the bars, wholly 
 ceased to be appreciable. It was a drawback 
 only in superficial commerce. With Captain 
 Everard she had simply the margin of the 
 universe. It may be imagined, therefore, 
 how their unuttered reference to all she 
 knew about him could, in this immensity, 
 play at its ease. Every time he handed in 
 a telegram it was an addition to her knowl 
 edge : what did his constant smile mean to 
 mark if it didn t mean to mark that? He
 
 IN THE CAGE 77 
 
 never came into the place without saying to 
 her in this manner: Oh yes, you have me 
 by this time so completely at your mercy 
 that it doesn t in the least matter what I 
 give you now. You ve become a comfort, I 
 assure you! 
 
 She had only two torments ; the greatest 
 of which was that she couldn t, not even 
 once or twice, touch with him on some indi 
 vidual fact. She would have given anything 
 to have been able to allude to one of his 
 friends by name, to one of his engagements 
 by date, to one of his difficulties by the solu 
 tion. She would have given almost as much 
 for just the right chance it would have 
 to be tremendously right to show him in 
 some sharp, sweet way that she had perfectly 
 penetrated the greatest of these last and now 
 lived with it in a kind of heroism of sym 
 pathy. He was in love with a woman to 
 whom, and to any view of whom, a lady- 
 telegraphist, and especially one who passed 
 a life among hams and cheeses, was as the 
 sand on the floor; and what her dreams
 
 78 IN THE CAGE 
 
 desired was the possibility of it somehow 
 coming to him that her own interest in him 
 could take a pure and noble account of such 
 an infatuation and even of such an impro 
 priety. As yet, however, she could only rub 
 along with the hope that an accident, sooner 
 or later, might give her a lift toward pop 
 ping out with something that would surprise 
 and perhaps even, some fine day, assist him. 
 What could people mean, moreover 
 cheaply sarcastic people by not feeling all 
 that could be got out of the weather? She 
 felt it all, and seemed literally to feel it 
 most when she went quite wrong, speaking 
 of the stuffy days as cold, of the cold ones 
 as stuffy, and betraying how little she knew, 
 in her cage, of whether it was foul or fair. 
 
 It was, for that matter, always stuffy at 
 Cocker s, and she finally settled down to the 
 safe proposition that the outside element was 
 changeable. Anything seemed true that 
 made him so radiantly assent. 
 
 This indeed is a small specimen of her 
 cultivation of insidious ways of making
 
 
 IN THE CAGE 79 
 
 things easy for him ways to which of course 
 she couldn t be at all sure that he did real 
 justice. Real justice was not of this world: 
 she had had too often to come back to that ; 
 yet, strangely, happiness was, and her traps 
 had to be set for it in a manner to keep them 
 unperceived by Mr. Buckton and the coun 
 ter-clerk. The most she could hope for apart 
 from the question, which constantly flick 
 ered up and died down, of the divine chance 
 of his consciously liking her, would be that, 
 without analysing it, he should arrive at a 
 vague sense that Cocker s was well, attrac 
 tive; easier, smoother, sociably brighter, 
 slightly more picturesque, in short more pro 
 pitious 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 sh^ 
 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
 
 80 IN THE CAGE 
 
 places and with other girls. But she would 
 defy any other girl to follow him as she fol 
 lowed. 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 humourous treat 
 ment 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 queer- 
 ness could scarce have been greater if he 
 had practised it for the very purpose of bring 
 ing their heads together over it as far as was 
 possible to heads on different sides of a cage. 
 It had taken her in reality but once or 
 twice to master these tricks, but, at the cost 
 of striking him perhaps as stupid, she could
 
 IN THE CAGE 81 
 
 still challenge them when circumstances 
 favoured. The great circumstance that 
 favoured was that she sometimes actually 
 believed he knew she only feigned perplex 
 ity. 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 his life; he had to 
 travel there were places to which he was 
 constantly wiring for rooms : all this she 
 granted him, forgave him; in fact, in the 
 long run, literally blessed and thanked him 
 for. If he had to lead his life, that pre 
 cisely fostered his leading it so much by 
 telegraph : therefore the benediction was to 
 come in when he could. That was all she 
 asked that he shouldn t wholly deprive her. 
 Sometimes she almost felt that he couldn t 
 have done so even had he been minded, on 
 account of the web of revelation that was
 
 82 IN THE CAGE 
 
 woven between them. She quite thrilled 
 herself with thinking what, with such a lot 
 of material, a bad girl would do. It would 
 be a scene better than many in her ha penny 
 novels, this going to him in the dusk of 
 evening at Park Chambers and letting him 
 at last have it. I know too much about a 
 certain person now not to put it to you 
 excuse my being so lurid that it s quite 
 worth your while to buy me off. Come, 
 therefore, buy me! There was a point 
 indeed at which such flights had to drop 
 again the point of an unreadiness to name, 
 when it came to that, the purchasing 
 medium. It wouldn t, certainly, be any 
 thing so gross as money, and the matter 
 accordingly remained rather vague, all the 
 more that she was not a bad girl. It was 
 not for any such reason as might have 
 aggravated a mere minx that she often 
 hoped he would again bring Cissy. The 
 difficulty of this, however, was constantly 
 present to her, for the kind of communion 
 to which Cocker s so richly ministered rested
 
 IN THE CAGE 83 
 
 on the fact that Cissy and he were so often 
 in different places. She knew by this time 
 all the places Suchbury, Monkhouse, White - 
 roy, Finches and even how the parties, on 
 these occasions, were composed; but her 
 subtlety found ways to make her knowledge 
 fairly protect and promote their keeping, as 
 she had heard Mrs. Jordan say, in touch. 
 So, when he actually sometimes smiled as 
 if he really felt the awkwardness of giving 
 her again one of the same old addresses, all 
 her being went out in the desire which her 
 face must have expressed that he should 
 recognise her forbearance to criticise as one 
 of the finest, tenderest sacrifices a woman 
 had ever made for love.
 
 XII 
 
 She was occasionally worried, all the 
 same, by the impression that these sacrifices, 
 great as they were, were nothing to those 
 that his own passion had imposed ; if indeed 
 it was not rather the passion of his confed 
 erate, which had caught him up and was 
 whirling him round like a great steam-wheel. 
 He was at any rate in the strong grip of a 
 dizzy, splendid fate ; the wild wind of his life 
 blew him straight before it. Didn t she 
 catch in his face, at times, even through 
 his smile and his happy habit, the gleam of 
 that pale glare with which a bewildered 
 victim appeals, as he passes, to some pair 
 of pitying eyes? He perhaps didn t even 
 himself know how scared he was; but she 
 knew. They were in danger, they were in 
 danger, Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen : 
 it beat every novel in the shop. She 
 
 thought of Mr. Mudge and his safe senti- 
 85
 
 86 IN THE CAGE 
 
 ment; she thought of herself and blushed 
 even more for her tepid response to it. It 
 was a comfort to her at such moments to 
 feel that in another relation a relation sup 
 plying that affinity with her nature that Mr. 
 Mudge, deluded creature, would never sup 
 ply she should have been no more tepid 
 than her ladyship. Her deepest soundings 
 were on two or three occasions of finding 
 herself almost sure that, if she dared, her 
 ladyship s lover would have gathered relief 
 from speaking to her. She literally fancied 
 once or twice that, projected as he was 
 toward his doom, her own eyes struck him, 
 while the air roared in his ears, as the one 
 pitying pair in the crowd. But how could 
 he speak to her while she sat sandwiched 
 there between the counter-clerk and the 
 sounder? 
 
 She had long ago, in her comings and 
 goings, made acquaintance with Park 
 Chambers and reflected, as she looked up at 
 their luxurious front, that they, of course, 
 would supply the ideal setting for the ideal
 
 IN THE CAGE 87 
 
 speech. There was not a picture in London 
 that, before the season was over, was more 
 stamped upon her brain. She went round 
 about to pass it, for it was not on the short 
 way ; she passed on the opposite side of the 
 street and always looked up, though it had 
 taken her a long time to be sure of the 
 particular set of windows. She had made 
 that out at last by an act of audacity that, at 
 the time, had almost stopped her heart 
 beats and that, in retrospect, greatly quick 
 ened her blushes. One evening, late, she 
 had lingered and watched watched for 
 some moment when the porter, who was in 
 uniform and often on the steps, had gone in 
 with a visitor. Then she followed boldly, 
 on the calculation that he would have taken 
 the visitor up and that the hall would be 
 free. The hall was free, and the electric 
 light played over the gilded and lettered 
 board that showed the names and numbers 
 of the occupants of the different floors. 
 What she wanted looked straight at her 
 Captain Everard was on the third. It was
 
 88 IN THE CAGE 
 
 as if, in the immense intimacy of this, they 
 were, for the instant and the first time, face 
 to face outside the cage. Alas, they were 
 face to face but a second or two: she was 
 whirled out on the wings of a panic fear 
 that he might just then be entering or issu 
 ing. This fear was indeed, in her shameless 
 deflections, never very far from her, and 
 was mixed in the oddest way with depres 
 sions and disappointments. It was dreadful, 
 as she trembled by, to run the risk of looking 
 to him as if she basely hung about ; and yet 
 it was dreadful to be obliged to pass only at 
 such moments as put an encounter out of 
 the question. 
 
 At the horrible hour of her first coming 
 to Cocker s he was always it was to be 
 hoped snug in bed ; and at the hour of her 
 final departure he was of course she had 
 such things all on her fingers -ends dressing 
 for dinner. We may let it pass that if she 
 could not bring herself to hover till he was 
 dressed, this was simply because such a 
 process for such a person could only be
 
 IN THE CAGE 89 
 
 terribly prolonged. When she went in the 
 middle of the day to her own dinner she 
 had too little time to do anything but go 
 straight, though it must be added that for 
 a real certainty she would joyously have 
 omitted the repast. She had made up her 
 mind as to there being on the whole no 
 decent pretext to justify her flitting casually 
 past at three o clock in the morning. That 
 was the hour at which, if the ha penny 
 novels were not all wrong, he probably came 
 home for the night. She was therefore 
 reduced to merely picturing that miraculous 
 meeting toward which a hundred impossibili 
 ties would have to conspire. But if nothing 
 was more impossible than the fact, nothing 
 was more intense than the vision. What 
 may not, we can only moralise, take place in 
 the quickened, muffled perception of a girl 
 of a certain kind of soul? All our young 
 friend s native distinction, her refinement of 
 personal grain, of heredity, of pride, took 
 refuge in this small throbbing spot; for 
 when she was most conscious of the abjec-
 
 90 IN THE CAGE 
 
 tion of her vanity and the pitifulness of her 
 little nutters and manoeuvres, then the con 
 solation and the redemption were most sure 
 to shine before her in some just discernible 
 sign. He did like her!
 
 XIII 
 
 He never brought Cissy back, but Cissy 
 came one day without him, as fresh as before 
 from the hands of Marguerite, or only, at 
 the season s end, a trifle less fresh. She 
 was, however, distinctly less serene. She 
 had brought nothing with her and looked 
 about with some impatience for the forms 
 and the place to write. The latter conveni 
 ence, at Cocker s, was obscure and barely 
 adequate, and her clear voice had the light 
 note of disgust which her lover s never 
 showed as she responded with a There? 
 of surprise to the gesture made by the 
 counter-clerk in answer to her sharp 
 inquiry. Our young friend was busy with 
 half-a-dozen people, but she had despatched 
 them in her most business-like manner by 
 the time her ladyship flung through the bars 
 the light of reappearance. Then the direct 
 ness with which the girl managed to receive 
 91
 
 92 IN THE CAGE 
 
 this missive was the result of the concen 
 tration that had caused her to make the 
 stamps fly during the few minutes occupied 
 by the production of it. This concentra 
 tion, in turn, may be described as the effect 
 of the apprehension of imminent relief. It 
 was nineteen days, counted and checked off, 
 since she had seen the object of her homage; 
 and as, had he been in London, she should, 
 with his habits, have been sure to see him 
 often, she was now about to learn what 
 other spot his presence might just then 
 happen to sanctify. For she thought of 
 them, the other spots, as ecstatically 
 conscious of it, expressively happy in it. 
 
 But, gracious, how handsome was her 
 ladyship, and what an added price it gave 
 him that the air of intimacy he threw out 
 should have flowed originally from such a 
 source ! The girl looked straight through the 
 cage at the eyes and lips that must so often 
 have been so near his own looked at them 
 with a strange passion that, for an instant, 
 had the result of filling out some of the gaps,
 
 IN THE CAGE 93 
 
 supplying the missing answers, in his cor 
 respondence. Then, as she made out that 
 the features she thus scanned and associated 
 were totally unaware of it, that they glowed 
 only with the color of quite other and not 
 at all guessable thoughts, this directly 
 added to their splendour, gave the girl the 
 sharpest impression she had yet received of 
 the uplifted, the unattainable plains of 
 heaven, and yet at the same time caused 
 her to thrill with a sense of the high com 
 pany she did somehow keep. She was with 
 the absent through her ladyship and with 
 her ladyship through the absent. The only 
 pang but it didn t matter was the proof 
 in the admirable face, in the sightless pre 
 occupation of its possessor, that the latter 
 hadn t a notion of her. Her folly had gone 
 to the point of half believing that the other 
 party to the affair must sometimes mention 
 in Eaton Square the extraordinary little 
 person at the place from which he so often 
 wired. Yet the perception of her visitor s 
 blankness actually helped this extraordinary
 
 94 IN THE CAGE 
 
 little person, the next instant, to take 
 refuge in a reflection that could be as proud 
 as it liked. How little she knows, how 
 little she knows! the girl cried to herself; 
 for what did that show after all but that 
 Captain Everard s telegraphic confidant was 
 Captain Everard s charming secret? Our 
 young friend s perusal of her ladyship s 
 telegram was literally prolonged by a 
 momentary daze: what swam between her 
 and the words, making her see them as 
 through rippled, shallow, sun shot water, 
 was the great, the perpetual flood of How 
 much / know how much / know! This 
 produced a delay in her catching that, on 
 the face, these words didn t give her what 
 she wanted, though she was prompt enough 
 with her remembrance that her grasp was, 
 half the time, just of what was not on the 
 face. Miss Dolman, Parade Lodge, Parade 
 Terrace, Dover. Let him instantly know 
 right one, Hotel De France, Ostend. Make 
 it seven nine four nine six one. Wire me 
 alternative Burfield s."
 
 IN THE CAGE 95 
 
 The girl slowly counted. Then he was at 
 Ostend. This hooked on with so sharp a 
 click that, not to feel she was as quickly 
 letting it all slip from her, she had abso 
 lutely to hold it a minute longer and to do 
 something to that end. Thus it was that 
 she did on this occasion what she never did, 
 threw off an Answer paid? that sounded 
 officious, but that she partly made up for by 
 deliberately affixing the stamps and by 
 waiting till she had done so to give change. 
 She had, for so much coolness, the strength 
 that she considered she knew all about Miss 
 Dolman. 
 
 Yes paid. She saw all sorts of things 
 in this reply, even to a small, suppressed 
 start of surprise at so correct an assump 
 tion ; even to an attempt, the next minute, 
 at a fresh air of detachment. How much, 
 with the answer?" The calculation was not 
 abstruse, but our intense observer required 
 a moment more to make it, and this gave 
 her ladyship time for a second thought. 
 Oh, just wait! The white, begemmed
 
 96 IN THE CAGE 
 
 hand bared to write rose in sudden nervous 
 ness to the side of the wonderful face which, 
 with eyes of anxiety for the paper on the 
 counter, she brought closer to the bars of 
 the cage. I think I must alter a word! 
 On this she recovered her telegram and 
 looked over it again; but she had a new, 
 obvious trouble, and studied it without 
 deciding and with much of the effect of 
 making our young woman watch her. 
 
 This personage, meanwhile, at the sight 
 of her expression, had decided on the spot. 
 If she had always been sure they were in 
 danger, her ladyship s expression was the 
 best possible sign of it. There was a word 
 wrong, but she had lost the right one, and 
 much, clearly, depended on her finding it 
 again. The girl, therefore, sufficiently 
 estimating the affluence of customers and 
 the distraction of Mr. Buckton and the 
 counter-clerk, took the jump and gave it. 
 Isn t it Cooper s? 
 
 It was as if she had bodily leaped cleared 
 the top of the cage and alighted on her
 
 IN THE CAGE 97 
 
 interlocutress. Cooper s? the stare was 
 heightened by a blush. Yes, she had made 
 Juno blush. 
 
 This was all the more reason for going 
 on. I mean instead of Burfield s. 
 
 Our young friend fairly pitied her; she 
 had made her in an instant so helpless, and 
 yet not a bit haughty nor outraged. She 
 was only mystified and scared. Oh, you 
 know ? 
 
 Yes, I know! Our young friend smiled, 
 meeting the other s eyes, and, having made 
 Juno blush, proceeded to patronise her. 
 / // do it she put out a competent hand. 
 Her ladyship only submitted, confused and 
 bewildered, all presence of mind quite gone ; 
 and the next moment the telegram was in 
 the cage again and its author out of the shop. 
 Then quickly, boldly, under all the eyes 
 that might have witnessed her tampering, 
 the extraordinary little person at Cocker s 
 made the proper change. People were 
 really too giddy, and if they were, in a cer 
 tain case, to be caught, it shouldn t be the
 
 98 IN THE CAGE 
 
 fault of her own grand memory. Hadn t it 
 been settled weeks before? for Miss Dol 
 man it was always to be Cooper s.
 
 XIV 
 
 But the summer holidays brought a 
 marked difference; they were holidays for 
 almost every one but the animals in the cage. 
 The August days were flat and dry, and, 
 with so little to feed it, she was conscious of 
 the ebb of her interest in the secrets of the 
 refined. She was in a position to follow the 
 refined to the extent of knowing they had 
 made so many of their arrangements with 
 her aid exactly where they were ; yet she 
 felt quite as if the panorama had ceased 
 unrolling and the band stopped playing. A 
 stray member of the latter occasionally 
 turned up, but the communications that 
 passed before her bore now largely on rooms 
 at hotels, prices of furnished houses, hours 
 of trains, dates of sailings and arrange 
 ments for being met : she found them for 
 the most part prosaic and coarse. The only 
 thing was that they brought into her stuffy 
 
 99
 
 ioo IN THE CAGE 
 
 corner as straight a whiff of Alpine mead 
 ows and Scotch moors as she might hope 
 ever to inhale; there were moreover, in 
 especial, fat, hot, dull ladies who had out 
 with her, to exasperation, the terms for sea 
 side lodgings, which struck her as huge, and 
 the matter of the number of beds required, 
 which was not less portentous: this in 
 reference to places of which the names 
 Eastbourne, Folkestone, Cromer, Scarbor 
 ough, Whitby tormented her with some 
 thing of the sound of the plash of water that 
 haunts the traveller in the desert. She had 
 not been out of London for a dozen years, 
 and the only thing to give a taste to the 
 present dead weeks was the spice of a chronic 
 resentment. The sparse customers, the 
 people she did see, were the people who 
 were just off off on the decks of flut 
 tered yachts, off to the uttermost point of 
 rocky headlands where the very breeze was 
 then playing for the want of which she said 
 to herself that she sickened. 
 
 There was accordingly a sense in which,
 
 IN THE CAGE 101 
 
 at such a period, the great differences of the 
 human condition could press upon her more 
 than ever; a circumstance drawing fresh 
 force, in truth, from the very fact of the 
 chance that at last, for a change, did squarely 
 meet her the chance to be off, for a bit, 
 almost as far as anybody. They took their 
 turns in the cage as they took them both in 
 the shop and at Chalk Farm, and she had 
 known these two months that time was to 
 be allowed in September no less than 
 eleven days for her personal, private holi 
 day. Much of her recent intercourse with 
 Mr. Mudge had consisted of the hopes and 
 fears, expressed mainly by himself, involved 
 in the question of their getting the same 
 dates a question that, in proportion as the 
 delight seemed assured, spread into a sea of 
 speculation over the choice of where and 
 how. All through July, on the Sunday 
 evenings and at such other odd times as he 
 could seize, he had flooded their talk with 
 wild waves of calculation. It was prac 
 tically settled that, with her mother, some-
 
 102 IN THE CAGE 
 
 where on the south coast (a phrase of 
 which she liked the sound) they should put 
 in their allowance together ; but she already 
 felt the prospect quite weary and worn with 
 the way he went round and round on it. It 
 had become his sole topic, the theme alike 
 of his most solemn prudences and most 
 placid jests, to which every opening led for 
 return and revision and in which every little 
 flower of a foretaste was pulled up as soon as 
 planted. He had announced at the earliest 
 day characterizing the whole business, from 
 that moment, as their plans, under which 
 name he handled it as a syndicate handles a 
 Chinese, or other, Loan he had promptly 
 declared that the question must be thor 
 oughly studied, and he produced, on the 
 whole subject, from day to day, an amount 
 of information that excited her wonder and 
 even, not a little, as she frankly let him 
 know, her disdain. When she thought of 
 the danger in which another pair of lovers 
 rapturously lived, she inquired of him anew 
 why he could leave nothing to chance.
 
 IN THE CAGE 103 
 
 Then she got for answer that this profundity 
 was just his pride, and he pitted Ramsgate 
 against Bournemouth and even Boulogne 
 against Jersey for he had great ideas with 
 all the mastery of detail that was some day, 
 professionally, to carry him far. 
 
 The longer the time since she had seen 
 Captain Everard, the more she was booked, 
 as she called it, to pass Park Chambers ; and 
 this was the sole amusement that, in the 
 lingering August days and the long, sad 
 twilights, it was left her to cultivate. She 
 had long since learned to know it for a 
 feeble one, though its feebleness was per 
 haps scarce the reason for her saying to 
 herself each evening as her time for de 
 parture approached: No, no not to-night. 
 She never failed of that silent remark, any 
 more than she failed of feeling, in some 
 deeper place than she had even yet fully 
 sounded, that one s remarks were as weak as 
 straws and that, however one might indulge 
 in them at eight o clock, one s fate infallibly 
 declared itself in absolute indifference to
 
 104 IN THE CAGE 
 
 them at about eight-fifteen. Remarks were 
 remarks, and very well for that; but fate 
 was fate, and this young lady s was to pass 
 Park Chambers every night in the working 
 week. Out of the immensity of her knowl 
 edge of the life of the world there bloomed 
 on these occasions a specific remembrance 
 that it was regarded in that region, in 
 August and September, as rather pleasant 
 just to be caught for something or other in 
 passing through town. Somebody was 
 always passing and somebody might catch 
 somebody else. It was in full cognisance of 
 this subtle law that she adhered to the most 
 ridiculous circuit she could have made to get 
 home. One warm, dull, featureless Friday, 
 when an accident had made her start from 
 Cocker s a little later than usual, she became 
 aware that something of which the infinite 
 possibilities had for so long peopled her 
 dreams was at last prodigiously upon her, 
 though the perfection in which the condi 
 tions happened to present it was almost 
 rich enough to be but the positive creation
 
 IN THE CAGE 105 
 
 of a dream. She saw, straight before her, 
 like a vista painted in a picture, the empty 
 street and the lamps that burned pale in the 
 dusk not yet established. It was into the 
 convenience of this quiet twilight that a 
 gentleman on the doorstep of the Chambers 
 gazed with a vagueness that our young 
 lady s little figure violently trembled, in the 
 approach, with the measure of its power to 
 dissipate. Everything indeed grew in a 
 flash terrific and distinct; her old uncertain 
 ties fell away from her, and, since she was 
 so familiar with fate, she felt as if the very 
 nail that fixed it were driven in by the hard 
 look with which, for a moment, Captain 
 Everard awaited her. 
 
 The vestibule was open behind him and 
 the porter as absent as on the day she had 
 peeped in; he had just come out was in 
 town, in a tweed suit and a pot hat, but 
 between two journeys duly bored over his 
 evening and at a loss what to do with it. 
 Then it was that she was glad she had never 
 met him in that way before: she reaped
 
 io6 IN THE CAGE 
 
 with such ecstacy the benefit of his not being 
 able to think she passed often. She jumped 
 in two seconds to the determination that he 
 should even suppose it to be the first time 
 and the queerest chance : this was while she 
 still wondered if he would identify or notice 
 her. His original attention had not, she 
 instinctively knew, been for the young 
 woman at Cocker s; it had only been for 
 any young woman who might advance with 
 an air of not upholding ugliness. Ah, but 
 then, and just as she had reached the door, 
 came his second observation, a long, light 
 reach with which, visibly and quite 
 amusedly, he recalled and placed her. They 
 were on different sides, but the street, nar 
 row and still, had only made more of a stage 
 for the small momentary drama. It was not 
 over, besides, it was far from over, even on 
 his sending across the way, with the pleas- 
 antest laugh she had ever heard, a little lift 
 of his hat and an Oh, good-evening! It 
 was still less over on their meeting, the 
 next minute, though rather indirectly and
 
 IN THE CAGE 107 
 
 awkwardly, in the middle of the road a 
 situation to which three or four steps of her 
 own had unmistakably contributed and 
 then passing not again to the side on which 
 she had arrived, but back toward the portal 
 of Park Chambers. 
 
 4 1 didn t know you at first. Are you 
 taking a walk? 
 
 Oh, I don t take walks at night! I m 
 going home after my work. 
 
 Oh! 
 
 That was practically what they had mean 
 while smiled out, and his exclamation, to 
 which, for a minute, he appeared to have 
 nothing to add, left them face to face and in 
 just such an attitude as, for his part, he 
 might have worn had he been wondering if 
 he could properly ask her to come in. Dur 
 ing this interval, in fact, she really felt his 
 question to be just How properly ? It 
 was simply a question of the degree of 
 properness.
 
 XV 
 
 She never knew afterwards quite what she 
 had done to settle it, and at the time she 
 only knew that they presently moved, with 
 vagueness, but with continuity, away from 
 the picture of the lighted vestibule and the 
 quiet stairs and well up the street together. 
 This also must have been in the absence of 
 a definite permission, of anything vulgarly 
 articulate, for that matter, on the part of 
 either ; and it was to be, later on, a thing of 
 remembrance and reflection for her that the 
 limit of what, just here, for a longish min 
 ute, passed between them was his taking in 
 her thoroughly successful deprecation, 
 though conveyed without pride or sound or 
 touch, of the idea that she might be, out of 
 the cage, the very shopgirl at large that she 
 hugged the theory she was not. Yes, it was 
 strange, she afterwards thought, that so 
 
 much could have come and gone and yet not 
 109
 
 no IN THE CAGE 
 
 troubled the air either with impertinence 
 or with resentment, with any of the horrid 
 notes of that kind of acquaintance. He 
 had taken no liberty, as she would have 
 called it ; and, through not having to betray 
 the sense of one, she herself had, still more 
 charmingly, taken none. Yet on the spot, 
 nevertheless, she could speculate as to what 
 it meant that, if his relation with Lady 
 Bradeen continued to be what her mind had 
 built it up to, he should feel free to proceed 
 in any private direction. This was one of 
 the questions he was to leave her to deal 
 with the question whether people of his 
 sort still asked girls up to their rooms when 
 they were so awfully in love with other 
 women. Could people of his sort do that with 
 out what people of her sort would call being 
 false to their love ? She had already a vision 
 of how the true answer was that people of 
 her sort didn t, in such cases, matter didn t 
 count as infidelity, counted only as some 
 thing else: she might have been curious, 
 since it came to that, to see exactly what.
 
 IN THE CAGE in 
 
 Strolling together slowly in their summer 
 twilight and their empty corner of Mayfair, 
 they found themselves emerge at last 
 opposite to one of the smaller gates of the 
 Park; upon which, without any particular 
 word about it they were talking so of other 
 things they crossed the street and went in 
 and sat down on a bench. She had gathered 
 by this time one magnificent hope about 
 him the hope that he would say nothing 
 vulgar. She knew what she meant by that ; 
 she meant something quite apart from any 
 matter of his being false. Their bench 
 was not far within; it was near the Park 
 Lane paling and the patchy lamplight and 
 the rumbling cabs and busses. A strange 
 emotion had come to her, and she felt 
 indeed excitement within excitement ; above 
 all a conscious joy in testing him with 
 chances he didn t take. She had an intense 
 desire he should know the type she really 
 was without her doing anything so low as 
 tell him, and he had surely begun to know 
 it from the moment he didn t seize the
 
 H2 IN THE CAGE 
 
 opportunities into which a common man 
 would promptly have blundered. These 
 were on the mere surface, and their relation 
 was behind and below them. She had 
 questioned so little on the way what they 
 were doing that as soon as they were seated 
 she took straight hold of it. Her hours, her 
 confinement, the many conditions of service 
 in the post-office, had with a glance at his 
 own postal resources and alternatives 
 formed, up to this stage, the subject of their 
 talk. Well, here we are, and it may be 
 right enough; but this isn t the least, you 
 know, where I was going. 
 
 You were going home? 
 
 Yes, and I was already rather late. I 
 was going to my supper. 
 
 You haven t had it? 
 
 No, indeed! 
 
 Then you haven t eaten ? 
 
 He looked, of a sudden, so extravagantly 
 concerned that she laughed out. All day? 
 Yes, we do feed once. But that was long 
 ago. So I must presently say good-bye.
 
 IN THE CAGE 113 
 
 Oh, deary me. r he exclaimed, with an 
 intonation so droll and yet a touch so light 
 and a distress so marked a confession of 
 helplessness for such a case, in short, so 
 unrelieved that she felt sure, on the spot, 
 she had made the great difference plain. 
 He looked at her with the kindest eyes and 
 still without saying what she had known he 
 wouldn t. She had known he wouldn t say 
 Then sup with me/ but the proof of it made 
 her feel as if she had feasted. 
 
 I m not a bit hungry, she went on. 
 
 Ah, you must be, awfully! he made 
 answer, but settling himself on the bench as 
 if, after all, that needn t interfere with his 
 spending his evening. I ve always quite 
 wanted the chance to thank you for the 
 trouble you so often take for me. 
 
 Yes, I know, she replied; uttering the 
 words with a sense of the situation far 
 deeper than any pretence of not fitting his 
 allusion. She immediately saw that he was 
 surprised and even a little puzzled at her 
 frank assent; but, for herself, the trouble
 
 H4 IN T HE CAGE 
 
 she had taken could only, in these fleeting 
 minutes they would probably never come 
 back be all there like a little hoard of gold 
 in her lap. Certainly he might look at it, 
 handle it, take up the pieces. Yet if he 
 understood anything he must understand all. 
 I consider you ve already immensely 
 thanked me. The horror was back upon 
 her of having seemed to hang about for some 
 reward. It s awfully odd that you should 
 have been there just the one time ! 
 
 The one time you ve passed my place? 
 
 Yes; you can fancy I haven t many min 
 utes to waste. There was a place to-night I 
 had to stop at. 
 
 I see, I see" he knew already so much 
 about her work. It must bean awful grind 
 for a lady. 
 
 It is; but I don t think I groan over it any 
 more than my companions and you ve seen 
 they re not ladies! She mildly jested, but 
 with an intention. One gets used to 
 things, and there are employments I should 
 have hated much more. She had the finest
 
 IN THE CAGE 115 
 
 conception of the beauty of not, at least, 
 boring him. To whine, to count up her 
 wrongs, was what a barmaid or a shopgirl 
 would do, and it was quite enough to sit 
 there like one of these. 
 
 If you had had another employment, he 
 remarked after a moment, we might never 
 have become acquainted. 
 
 It s highly probable and certainly not 
 in the same way. Then, still with her heap 
 of gold in her lap and something of the pride 
 of it in her manner of holding her head, she 
 continued not to move she only smiled at 
 him. The evening had thickened now ; the 
 scattered lamps were red; the Park, all 
 before them, was full of obscure and ambig 
 uous life ; there were other couples on other 
 benches, whom it was impossible not to see, 
 yet at whom it was impossible to look. But 
 I ve walked so much out of my way with you 
 only just to show you that that with this 
 she paused ; it was not, after all, so easy to 
 express that anything you may have 
 thought is perfectly true.
 
 u6 IN THE CAGE 
 
 4 Oh, I ve thought a tremendous lot! her 
 companion laughed. Do you mind my 
 smoking? 
 
 Why should I? You always smoke there. 
 
 At your place? Oh, yes, but here* it s 
 different. 
 
 No, she said, as he lighted a cigarette, 
 that s just what it isn t. It s quite the same. 
 
 Well, then, that s because "there" it s so 
 wonderful! 
 
 Then you re conscious of how wonderful 
 it is? she returned. 
 
 He jerked his handsome head in literal 
 protest at a doubt. Why, that s exactly 
 what I mean by my gratitude for all your 
 trouble. It has been just as if you took a 
 particular interest. She only looked at him 
 in answer to this, in such sudden, immediate 
 embarrassment, as she was quite aware, 
 that, while she remained silent, he showed 
 he was at a loss to interpret her expression. 
 You have haven t you? taken a particular 
 interest? 
 
 Oh, a particular interest! she quavered
 
 IN THE CAGE 117 
 
 out, feeling the whole thing her immediate 
 embarrassment get terribly the better of 
 her, and wishing, with a sudden scare, all 
 the more to keep her emotion down. She 
 maintained her fixed smile a moment and 
 turned her eyes over the peopled darkness, 
 unconfused now, because there was some 
 thing much more confusing. This, with a 
 fatal great rush, was simply the fact that 
 they were thus together. They were near, 
 near, and all that she had imagined of that 
 had only become more true, more dreadful 
 and overwhelming. She stared straight 
 away in silence till she felt that she looked 
 like an idiot; then, to say something, to say 
 nothing, she attempted a sound which ended 
 in a flood of tears,
 
 XVI 
 
 Her tears helped her really to dissimulate, 
 for she had instantly, in so public a situa 
 tion, to recover herself. They had come 
 and gone in half a minute, and she imme 
 diately explained them. It s only because 
 I m tired. It s that it s that! Then she 
 added a trifle incoherently: I shall never 
 see you again. 
 
 Ah, but why not? The mere tone in 
 which her companion asked this satisfied 
 her once for all as to the amount of imagi 
 nation for which she could count on him. It 
 was naturally not large: it had exhausted 
 itself in having arrived at what he had 
 already touched upon the sense of an 
 intention in her poor zeal at Cocker s. But 
 any deficiency of this kind was no fault in 
 him ; he wasn t obliged to have an inferior 
 cleverness to have second-rate resources 
 
 and virtues. It had been as if he almost 
 119
 
 120 IN THE CAGE 
 
 really believed she had simply cried for 
 fatigue, and he had accordingly put in some 
 kind, confused plea You ought really to 
 take something: won t you have something 
 or other somezvhere? to which she had 
 made no response but a headshake of a 
 sharpness that settled it. Why shan t we 
 all the more keep meeting? 
 
 I mean meeting this way only this way. 
 At my place there that I ve nothing to do 
 with, and I hope of course you ll turn up, 
 with your correspondence, when it suits 
 you. Whether I stay or not, I mean ; for I 
 shall probably not stay. 
 
 You re going somewhere else? he put it 
 with positive anxiety. 
 
 Yes; ever so far away to the other end 
 of London. There are all sorts of reasons 
 I can t tell you; and it s practically settled. 
 It s better for me, much; and I ve only 
 kept on at Cocker s for you. 
 
 For me? 
 
 Making out in the dusk that he fairly 
 blushed, she now measured how far he had
 
 IN THE CAGE 121 
 
 been from knowing too much. Too much, 
 she called it at present ; and that was easy, 
 since it proved so abundantly enough for 
 her that he should simply be where he was. 
 As we shall never talk this way but to-night 
 never, never again! here it all is; I ll say 
 it; I don t care what you think; it doesn t 
 matter ; I only want to help you. Besides, 
 you re kind you re kind. I ve been think 
 ing, then, of leaving for ever so long. But 
 you ve come so often at times and you ve 
 had so much to do, and it has been so pleas 
 ant and interesting, that I ve remained, I ve 
 kept putting off any change. More than 
 once, when I had nearly decided, you ve 
 turned up again and I ve thought, "Oh, no!" 
 That s the simple fact! She had by this 
 time got her confusion down so completely 
 that she could laugh. This is what I meant 
 when I said to you just now that I "knew." 
 I ve known perfectly that you knew I took 
 trouble for you; and that knowledge has 
 been for me, and I seemed to see it was for 
 you, as if there were something I don t
 
 122 IN THE CAGE 
 
 know what to call it! between us. I mean 
 something unusual and good something not 
 a bit horrid or vulgar. 
 
 She had by this time, she could see, pro 
 duced a great effect upon him; but she 
 would have spoken the truth to herself if she 
 had at the same moment declared that she 
 didn t in the least care: all the more that 
 the effect must be one of extreme perplexity. 
 What, in it all, was visibly clear for him, 
 none the less, was that he was tremendously 
 glad he had met her. She held him, and he 
 was astonished at the force of it; he was 
 intent, immensely considerate. His elbow 
 was on the back of the seat, and his head, 
 with the pot-hat pushed quite back, in a 
 boyish way, so that she really saw almost for 
 the first time his forehead and hair, rested 
 on the hand into which he had crumpled his 
 gloves. Yes, he assented, it s not a bit 
 horrid or vulgar. 
 
 She just hung fire a moment; then she 
 brought out the whole truth. I d do any 
 thing for you. I d do anything for you.
 
 IN THE CAGE 123 
 
 Never in her life had she known anything so 
 high and fine as this, just letting him have 
 it and bravely and magnificently leaving it. 
 Didn t the place, the associations and cir 
 cumstances, perfectly make it sound what it 
 was not ; and wasn t that exactly the beauty? 
 So she bravely and magnificently left it, 
 and little by little she felt him take it up, 
 take it down, as if they had been on a satin 
 sofa in a boudoir. She had never seen a 
 boudoir, but there had been lots of boudoirs 
 in the telegrams. What she had said, at all 
 events, sank into him, so that after a minute 
 he simply made a movement that had the 
 result of placing his hand on her own 
 presently indeed that of her feeling her 
 self firmly enough grasped. There was no 
 pressure she need return, there was none 
 she need decline; she just sat admirably 
 still, satisfied, for the time, with the sur 
 prise and bewilderment of the impression 
 she made on him. His agitation was even 
 greater, on the whole, than she had at 
 first allowed for. I say, you know, you
 
 124 IN THE CAGE 
 
 mustn t think of leaving! he at last broke 
 out. 
 
 Of leaving Cocker s, you mean? 
 
 Yes, you must stay on there, whatever 
 happens, and help a fellow. 
 
 She was silent a little, partly because it 
 was so strange and exquisite to feel him 
 watch her as if it really mattered to him 
 and he were almost in suspense. Then you 
 have quite recognised what I ve tried to 
 do? she asked. 
 
 Why, wasn t that exactly what I dashed 
 over from my door just now to thank you for? 
 
 Yes; so you said. 
 
 And don t you believe it? 
 
 She looked down a moment at his hand, 
 which continued to cover her own ; where 
 upon he presently drew it back, rather rest 
 lessly folding his arms. Without answering 
 his question she went on: Have you ever 
 spoken of me? 
 
 Spoken of you? 
 
 Of my being there of my knowing, and 
 that sort of thing.
 
 IN THE CAGE 125 
 
 Oh, never to a human creature! he 
 eagerly declared. 
 
 She had a small drop at this, which was 
 expressed in another pause ; after which she 
 returned to what he had just asked her. 
 Oh, yes, I quite believe you like it my 
 always being there and our taking things up 
 so familiarly and successfully : if not exactly 
 where we left them, she laughed, almost 
 always, at least, in an interesting place! 
 He was about to say something in reply to 
 this, but her friendly gaiety was quicker. 
 You want a great many things in life, a 
 great many comforts and helps and luxuries 
 you want everything as pleasant as pos 
 sible. Therefore, so far as it s in the power 
 of any particular person to contribute to all 
 
 that She had turned her face to him 
 
 smiling, just thinking. 
 
 Oh, see here! But he was highly 
 amused. Well, what then? he inquired, 
 as if to humour her. 
 
 Why, the particular person must never 
 fail. We must manage it for you somehow.
 
 i 2 6 IN THE CAGE 
 
 He threw back his head, laughing out; 
 he was really exhilarated. Oh, yes, some 
 how! 
 
 Well, I think we each do don t we? in 
 one little way and another and according to 
 our limited lights. I m pleased, at any 
 rate, for myself, that you are; for I assure 
 you I ve done my best. 
 
 You do better than any one! He had 
 struck a match for another cigarette, and 
 the flame lighted an instant his responsive, 
 finished face, magnifying into a pleasant 
 grimace the kindness with which he paid her 
 this tribute. You re awfully clever, you 
 
 know; cleverer, cleverer, cleverer ! 
 
 He had appeared on the point of making 
 some tremendous statement ; then suddenly, 
 puffing his cigarette and shifting almost 
 with violence on his seat, let it altogether 
 fall.
 
 XVII 
 
 In spite of this drop, if not just by reason 
 of it, she felt as if Lady Bradeen, all but 
 named out, had popped straight up ; and she 
 practically betrayed her consciousness by 
 waiting a little before she rejoined: Clev 
 erer than who? 
 
 Well, if I wasn t afraid you d think I 
 swagger, I should say than anybody! If 
 you leave your place there, where shall you 
 go? he more gravely demanded. 
 
 Oh, too far for you ever to find me! 
 
 I d find you anywhere. 
 
 The tone of this was so still more serious 
 that she had but her one acknowledgment. 
 I d do anything for you I d do anything 
 for you, she repeated. She had already, 
 she felt, said it all; so what did anything 
 more, anything less, matter? That was the 
 very reason indeed why she could, with a 
 lighter note, ease him generously of any
 
 128 IN THE CAGE 
 
 awkwardness produced by solemnity, either 
 his own or hers. Of course it must be nice 
 for you to be able to think there are people 
 all about who feel in such a way. 
 
 In immediate appreciation of this, how 
 ever, he only smoked without looking at her. 
 But you don t want to give up your present 
 work? he at last inquired. I mean you 
 will stay in the post-office? 
 
 Oh, yes; I think I ve a genius for that. 
 
 Rather ! No one can touch you. With 
 this he turned more to her again. But you 
 can get, with a move, greater advantages? 
 
 I can get, in the suburbs, cheaper lodg 
 ings. I will live with my mother. We need 
 some space; and there s a particular place 
 that has other inducements. 
 
 He just hesitated. Where is it? 
 
 Oh, quite out of your way. You d never 
 have time. 
 
 But I tell you I d go anywhere. Don t 
 you believe it? 
 
 Yes, for once or twice. But you d soon 
 see it wouldn t do for you.
 
 IN THE CAGE 129 
 
 He smoked and considered; seemed to 
 stretch himself a little and, with his legs out, 
 surrender himself comfortably. Well, well, 
 well I believe everything you say. I take 
 it from you anything you like in the most 
 extraordinary way. It struck her certainly 
 and almost without bitterness that the 
 way in which she was already, as if she had 
 been an old friend, arranging for him and 
 preparing the only magnificence she could 
 muster, was quite the most extraordinary. 
 Don t, don t go! he presently went on. I 
 shall miss you too horribly ! 
 
 So that you just put it to me as a definite 
 request? oh, how she tried to divest this 
 of all sound of the hardness of bargaining! 
 That ought to have been easy enough, for 
 what was she arranging to get? Before he 
 could answer she had continued: To be 
 perfectly fair, I should tell you I recognise 
 at Cocker s certain strong attractions. All 
 you people come. I like all the horrors. 
 
 The horrors? 
 
 Those you all you know the set I mean,
 
 130 IN THE CAGE 
 
 your set show me with as good a conscience 
 as if I had no more feeling than a letter 
 box. 
 
 He looked quite excited at the way she 
 put it. Oh, they don t know! 
 
 Don t know I m not stupid? No, how 
 should they? 
 
 Yes, how should they? said the Captain 
 sympathetically. But isn t "horrors" 
 rather strong? 
 
 What you do is rather strong! the girl 
 promptly returned. 
 
 What /do? 
 
 Your extravagance, your selfishness, your 
 immorality, your crimes, she pursued, with 
 out heeding his expression. 
 
 I say! her companion showed the 
 queerest stare. 
 
 I like them, as I tell you I revel in 
 them. But we needn t go into that, she 
 quietly went on; for all I get out of it is the 
 harmless pleasure of knowing. I know, I 
 know, I know! she breathed it ever so 
 gently.
 
 IN THE CAGE 131 
 
 Yes; that s what has been between us, 
 he answered much more simply. 
 
 She could enjoy his simplicity in silence, 
 and for a moment she did so. If I do stay 
 because you want it and I m rather capable 
 of that there are two or three things I 
 think you ought to remember. One is, you 
 know, that I m there sometimes for days and 
 weeks together without your ever coming. 
 
 Oh, I ll come everyday! he exclaimed. 
 
 She was on the point, at this, of imitating 
 with her hand his movement of shortly 
 before; but she checked herself, and there 
 was no want of effect in the tranquillising 
 way in which she said: How can you? 
 How can you? 1 He had, too manifestly, 
 only to look at it there, in the vulgarly ani 
 mated gloom, to see that he couldn t; and at 
 this point, by the mere action of his silence, 
 everything they had so definitely not named, 
 the whole presence round which they had 
 been circling became a part of their refer 
 ence, settled solidly between them. It was 
 as if then, for a minute, they sat and saw it
 
 i 3 2 IN THE CAGE 
 
 all in each other s eyes, saw so much that 
 there was no need of a transition for sound 
 ing it at last. Your danger, your danger 
 ! Her voice indeed trembled with it, and 
 she could only, for the moment, again leave 
 it so. 
 
 During this moment he leaned back on 
 the bench, meeting her in silence and with 
 a face that grew more strange. It grew so 
 strange that, after a further instant, she 
 got straight up. She stood there as if their 
 talk were now over, and he just sat and 
 watched her. It was as if now owing to 
 the third person they had brought in they 
 must be more careful ; so that the most he 
 could finally say was: That s where it is! 
 
 That s where it is! the girl as guardedly 
 replied. He sat still, and she added: I 
 won t abandon you. Good-bye. 
 
 Good-bye? he appealed, but without 
 moving. 
 
 I don t quite see my way, but I won t 
 abandon you, she repeated. There. Good 
 bye.
 
 IN THE CAGE 133 
 
 It brought him with a jerk to his feet, 
 tossing away his cigarette. His poor face 
 was flushed. See here see here! 
 
 No, I won t; but I must leave you now, 
 she went on as if not hearing him. 
 
 See here see here! He tried, from the 
 bench, to take her hand again. 
 
 But that definitely settled it for her : this 
 would, after all, be as bad as his asking her 
 to supper. You mustn t come with me 
 no, no! 
 
 He sank back, quite blank, as if she had 
 pushed him. I mayn t see you home? 
 
 No, no; let me go. He looked almost as 
 if she had struck him, but she didn t care; 
 and the manner in which she spoke it was 
 literally as if she were angry had the force 
 of a command. Stay where you are ! 
 
 See here see here! he nevertheless 
 pleaded. 
 
 I won t abandon you! she cried once 
 more this time quite with passion; on 
 which she got away from him as fast as she 
 could and left him staring after her.
 
 XVIII 
 
 Mr. Mudge had lately been so occupied 
 with their famous plans that he had 
 neglected, for a while, the question of her 
 transfer; but down at Bournemouth, which 
 had found itself selected as the field of their 
 recreation by a process consisting, it seemed, 
 exclusively of innumerable pages of the 
 neatest arithmetic in a very greasy, but most 
 orderly little pocket-book, the distracting 
 possible melted away the fleeting irremedi 
 able ruled the scene. The plans, hour by 
 hour, were simply superseded, and it was 
 much of a rest to the girl, as she sat on the 
 pier and overlooked the sea and the com 
 pany, to see them evaporate in rosy fumes 
 and to feel that from moment to moment 
 there was less left to cipher about. The 
 week proved blissfully fine, and her mother, 
 at their lodgings partly to her embarrass 
 ment and partly to her relief struck up 
 135
 
 136 IN THE CAGE 
 
 with the landlady an alliance that left the 
 younger couple a great deal of freedom. 
 This relative took her pleasure of a week at 
 Bournemouth in a stuffy back-kitchen and 
 endless talks; to that degree even that Mr. 
 Mudge himself habitually inclined indeed 
 to a scrutiny of all mysteries and to seeing, 
 as he sometimes admitted, too much in 
 things made remarks on it as he sat on the 
 cliff with his betrothed, or on the decks of 
 steamers that conveyed them, close-packed 
 items in terrific totals of enjoyment, to the 
 Isle of Wight and the Dorset coast. 
 
 He had a lodging in another house, where 
 he had speedily learned the importance of 
 keeping his eyes open, and he made no 
 secret of his suspecting that sinister mutual 
 connivances might spring, under the roof of 
 his companions, from unnatural sociabilities. 
 At the same time he fully recognised that, 
 as a source of anxiety, not to say of expense, 
 his future mother-in-law would have 
 weighted them more in accompanying their 
 steps than in giving her hostess, in the
 
 IN THE CAGE 137 
 
 interest of the tendency they considered 
 that they never mentioned, equivalent 
 pledges as to the tea-caddy and the jam-pot. 
 These were the questions these indeed the 
 familiar commodities that he had now to 
 put into the scales ; and his betrothed had, 
 in consequence, during her holiday, the odd, 
 and yet pleasant and almost languid, sense 
 of an anticlimax. She had become con 
 scious of an extraordinary collapse, a sur 
 render to stillness and to retrospect. She 
 cared neither to walk nor to sail; it was 
 enough for her to sit on benches and wonder 
 at the sea and taste the air and not be at 
 Cocker s and not see the counter-clerk. 
 She still seemed to wait for something 
 something in the key of the immense discus 
 sions that had mapped out their little week 
 of idleness on the scale of a world-atlas. 
 Something came at last, but without perhaps 
 appearing quite adequately to crown the 
 monument. 
 
 Preparation and precaution were, however, 
 the natural flowers of Mr. Mudge s mind,
 
 138 IN THE CAGE 
 
 and in proportion as these things declined 
 in one quarter they inevitably bloomed else 
 where. He could always, at the worst, have 
 on Tuesday the project of their taking the 
 Swanage boat on Thursday, and on Thurs 
 day that of their ordering minced kidneys on 
 Saturday. He had, moreover, a constant 
 gift of inexorable inquiry as to where and 
 what they should have gone and have done 
 if they had not been exactly as they were. 
 He had in short his resources, and his mis 
 tress had never been so conscious of them ; 
 on the other hand they had never interfered 
 so little with her own. She liked to be as 
 she was if it could only have lasted. She 
 could accept even without bitterness a rigour 
 of economy so great that the little fee they 
 paid for admission to the pier had to be bal 
 anced against other delights. The people 
 at Ladle s and atThrupp s had their ways of 
 amusing themselves, whereas she had to sit 
 and hear Mr. Mudge talk of what he might 
 do if he didn t take a bath, or of the bath he 
 might take if he only hadn t taken something
 
 IN THE CAGE 139 
 
 else. He was always with her now, of 
 course, always beside her; she saw him 
 more than hourly, more than ever yet, 
 more even than he had planned she should 
 do at Chalk Farm. She preferred to sit at 
 the far end, away from the band and the 
 crowd ; as to which she had frequent differ 
 ences with her friend, who reminded her 
 often that they could have only in the thick 
 of it the sense of the money they were get 
 ting back. That had little effect on her, for 
 she got back her money by seeing many 
 things, the things of the past year, fall 
 together and connect themselves, undergo 
 the happy relegation that transforms melan 
 choly and misery, passion and effort, into 
 experience and knowledge. 
 
 She liked having done with them, as she 
 assured herself she had practically done, 
 and the strange thing was that she neither 
 missed the procession now nor wished to 
 keep her place for it. It had become there, 
 in the sun and the breeze and the sea-smell, 
 a far-away story, a picture of another life.
 
 140 IN THE CAGE 
 
 If Mr. Mudge himself liked processions, 
 liked them at Bournemouth and on the pier 
 quite as much as at Chalk Farm or any 
 where, she learned after a little not to be 
 worried by his perpetual counting of the fig 
 ures that made them up. There were 
 dreadful women in particular, usually fat 
 and in men s caps and white shoes, whom 
 he could never let alone not that she 
 cared ; it was not the great world, the world 
 of Cocker s and Ladle s and Thrupp s, but 
 it offered an endless field to his faculties of 
 memory, philosophy and frolic. She had 
 never accepted him so much, never arranged 
 so successfully for making him chatter while 
 she carried on secret conversations. Her 
 talks were with herself, and if they both 
 practised a great thrift she had quite mas 
 tered that of merely spending words enough 
 to keep him imperturbably and continuously 
 going. 
 
 He was charmed with the panorama, not 
 knowing or at any rate not at all showing 
 that he knew what far other images peopled
 
 IN THE CAGE 141 
 
 her mind than the women in the navy caps 
 and the shopboys in the blazers. His 
 observations on these types, his general 
 interpretation of the show, brought home to 
 her the prospect of Chalk Farm. She won 
 dered sometimes that he should have derived 
 so little illumination, during his period, from 
 the society at Cocker s. But one evening, 
 as their holiday cloudlessly waned, he gave 
 her such a proof of his quality as might 
 have made her ashamed of her small 
 reserves. He brought out something that, 
 in all his overflow, he had been able to keep 
 back till other matters were disposed of. It 
 was the announcement that he was at last 
 ready to marry that he saw his way. A 
 rise at Chalk Farm had been offered him ; he 
 was to be taken into the business, bringing 
 with him a capital the estimation of which 
 by other parties constituted the handsomest 
 recognition yet made of the head on his 
 shoulders. Therefore their waiting was 
 over it could be a question of a near date. 
 They would settle this date before going
 
 142 IN THE CAGE 
 
 back, and he meanwhile had his eye on a 
 sweet little home. He would take her to 
 see it on their first Sunday.
 
 XIX 
 
 His having kept this great news for the 
 last, having had such a card up his sleeve 
 and not floated it out in the current of his 
 chatter and the luxury of their leisure, was 
 one of those incalculable strokes by which 
 he could still affect her ; the kind of thing 
 that reminded her of the latent force that 
 had ejected the drunken soldier an exam 
 ple of the profundity of which his promotion 
 was the proof. She listened awhile in si 
 lence, on this occasion, to the wafted strains 
 of the music ; she took it in as she had not 
 quite done before that her future was now 
 constituted. Mr. Mudge was distinctly her 
 fate ; yet at this moment she turned her face 
 quite away from him, showing him so long 
 a mere quarter of her cheek that she at last 
 again heard his voice. He couldn t see a 
 pair of tears that were partly the reason of 
 
 her delay to give him the assurance he 
 143
 
 144 IN THE CAGE 
 
 required ; "but he expressed at a venture the 
 hope that she had had her fill of Cocker s. 
 
 She was finally able to turn back. Oh, 
 quite. There s nothing going on. No one 
 comes but the Americans at Thrupp s, and 
 they don t do much. They don t seem to 
 have a secret in the world. 
 
 Then the extraordinary reason you ve 
 been giving me for holding on there has 
 ceased to work? 
 
 She thought a moment. Yes, that one. 
 I ve seen the thing through I ve got them 
 all in my pocket. 
 
 So you re ready to come? 
 
 For a little, again, she made no answer. 
 No, not yet, all the same. I ve still got a 
 reason a different one. 
 
 He looked her all over as if it might have 
 been something she kept in her mouth or 
 her glove or under her jacket something 
 she was even sitting upon. Well, I ll have 
 it, please. 
 
 I went out the other night and sat in the 
 Park with a gentleman, she said at last.
 
 IN THE CAGE 145 
 
 Nothing was ever seen like his confidence 
 in her; and she wondered a little now why 
 it didn t irritate her. It only gave her ease 
 and space, as she felt, for telling him the 
 whole truth that no one knew. It had 
 arrived at present at her really wanting to 
 do that, and yet to do it not in the least for 
 Mr. Mudge, but altogether and only for her 
 self. This truth filled out for her there the 
 whole experience she was about to relinquish, 
 suffused and coloured it as a picture that she 
 should keep and that, describe it as she 
 might, no one but herself would ever really 
 see. Moreover she had no desire whatever 
 to make Mr. Mudge jealous; there would be 
 no amusement in it, for the amusement she 
 had lately known had spoiled her for lower 
 pleasures. There were even no materials for 
 it. The odd thing was that she never 
 doubted that, properly handled, his passion 
 was poisonable; what had happened was 
 that he had calmly selected a partner with 
 no poison to distil. She read then and there 
 that she should never interest herself in
 
 146 IN THE CAGE 
 
 anybody as to whom some other sentiment, 
 some superior view, wouldn t be sure to 
 interfere, for him, with jealousy. And 
 what did you get out of that? he asked with 
 a concern that was not in the least for his 
 honour. 
 
 Nothing but a good chance to promise 
 him I wouldn t forsake him. He s one of 
 my customers. 
 
 Then it s for him not to forsake you. 
 
 Well, he won t. It s all right. But I 
 must just keep on as long as he may want 
 me. 
 
 Want you to sit with him in the Park? 
 
 He may want me for that but I shan t. 
 I rather like it, but once, under the circum 
 stances, is enough. I can do better for him 
 in another manner. 
 
 And what manner, pray? 
 
 Well, elsewhere. 
 
 Elsewhere ! I say! 
 
 This was an ejaculation used also by Cap 
 tain Everard, but, oh, with what a different 
 sound! You needn t "say" there s noth-
 
 IN THE CAGE 147 
 
 ing to be said. And yet you ought perhaps 
 to know. 
 
 Certainly I ought. But what up to 
 now? 
 
 Why, exactly what I told him. That I 
 would do anything for him. 
 
 What do you mean by "anything"? 
 
 Everything. 
 
 Mr. Mudge s immediate comment on this 
 statement was to draw from his pocket a 
 crumpled paper containing the remains of 
 half a pound of sundries. These sundries 
 had figured conspicuously in his prospective 
 sketch of their tour, but it was only at the 
 end of three days that they had defined 
 themselves unmistakably as chocolate- 
 creams. Have another? that one, he said. 
 She had another, but not the one he indi 
 cated, and then he continued: What took 
 place afterwards? 
 
 Afterwards? 
 
 What did you do when you had told him 
 you would do everything? 
 
 I simply came away.
 
 148 IN THE CAGE 
 
 Out of the Park? 
 
 Yes, leaving him there. I didn t let him 
 follow me. 
 
 Then what did you let him do? 
 
 I didn t let him do anything. 
 
 Mr. Mudge considered an instant. Then 
 what did you go there for? His tone was 
 even slightly critical. 
 
 I didn t quite know at the time. It was 
 simply to be with him, I suppose just 
 once. He s in danger, and I wanted him to 
 know I know it. It makes meeting him 
 t Cocker s, for it s that I want to stay on 
 for more interesting. 
 
 It makes it mighty interesting for me! 1 
 Mr. Mudge freely declared. Yet he didn t 
 follow you? he asked, /would! 
 
 Yes, of course. That was the way you 
 began, you know. You re awfully inferior 
 to him. 
 
 Well, my dear, you re not inferior to any 
 body. You ve got a cheek ! What is he in 
 danger of? 
 
 Of being found out. He s in love with a
 
 IN THE CAGE 149 
 
 lady and it isn t right and I ve found him 
 out. 
 
 That ll be a look-out for me! Mr. Mudge 
 joked. You mean she has a husband? 
 
 Never mind what she has! They re in 
 awful danger, but his is the worst, because 
 he s in danger from her too. 
 
 Like me from you the woman / love? 
 If he s in the same funk as me 
 
 He s in a worse one. He s not only 
 afraid of the lady he s afraid of other 
 things. 
 
 Mr. Mudge selected another chocolate 
 cream. Well, I m only afraid of one! But 
 how in the world can you help this party? 
 
 I don t know perhaps not at all. But 
 so long as there s a chance 
 
 You won t come away? 
 
 No, you ve got to wait for me. 
 
 Mr. Mudge enjoyed what was in his 
 mouth. And what will he give you? 
 
 Give me? 
 
 If you do help him. 
 
 Nothing. Nothing in all the wide world.
 
 i 5 o IN THE CAGE 
 
 Then what will he give mef Mr. Mudge 
 inquired. 4 1 mean for waiting. 
 
 The girl thought a moment ; then she got 
 up to walk. He never heard of you, she 
 replied. 
 
 You haven t mentioned me? 
 
 We never mention anything. What I ve 
 told you is just what I ve found out. 
 
 Mr. Mudge, who had remained on the 
 bench, looked up at her ; she often preferred 
 to be quiet when he proposed to walk, but 
 now that he seemed to wish to sit she had a 
 desire to move. But you haven t told me 
 what he has found out. 
 
 She considered her lover. He d never 
 find^M, my dear! 
 
 Her lover, still on his seat, appealed to her 
 in something of the attitude in which she 
 had last left Captain Everard, but the 
 impression was not the same. Then where 
 do I come in? 
 
 You don t come in at all. That s just 
 the beauty of it! and with this she turned 
 to mingle with the multitude collected round
 
 IN THE CAGE 151 
 
 the band. Mr. Mudge presently overtook 
 her and drew her arm into his own with a 
 quiet force that expressed the serenity of 
 possession; in consonance with which it 
 was only when they parted for the night at 
 her door that he referred again to what she 
 had told him. 
 
 Have you seen him since? 
 
 Since the night in the Park? No, not 
 once. 
 
 Oh, what a cad! said Mr. Mudge.
 
 XX 
 
 It was not until the end of October that 
 she saw Captain Everard again, and on that 
 occasion the only one of all the series on 
 which hindrance had been so utter no 
 communication with him proved possible. 
 She had made out, even from the cage, that 
 it was a charming golden day: a patch 
 of hazy autumn sunlight lay across the 
 sanded floor and also, higher up, quick 
 ened into brightness a row of ruddy 
 bottled syrups. Work was slack and the 
 place in general empty; the town, as they 
 said in the cage, had not waked up, and 
 the feeling of the day likened itself to 
 something that in happier conditions she 
 would have thought of romantically as St. 
 Martin s summer. The counter-clerk had 
 gone to his dinner; she herself was busy 
 with arrears of postal jobs, in the midst of 
 
 which she became aware that Captain 
 153
 
 154 IN THE CAGE 
 
 Everard had apparently been in the shop a 
 minute and that Mr. Buckton had already 
 seized him. 
 
 He had, as usual, half a dozen telegrams, 
 and when he saw that she saw him and their 
 eyes met he gave, on bowing to her, an 
 exaggerated laugh in which she read a new 
 consciousness. It was a confession of awk 
 wardness ; it seemed to tell her that of course 
 he knew he ought better to have kept his 
 head, ought to have been clever enough to 
 wait, on some pretext, till he should have 
 found her free. Mr. Buckton was a long 
 time with him, and her attention was soon 
 demanded by other visitors: so that noth 
 ing passed between them but the fulness of 
 their silence. The look she took from him 
 was his greeting, and the other one a simple 
 sign of the eyes sent her before going out. 
 The only token they exchanged, therefore, 
 was his tacit assent to her wish that, since 
 they couldn t attempt a certain frankness, 
 they should attempt nothing at all. This 
 was her intense preference ; she could be as
 
 IN THE CAGE 155 
 
 still and cold as any one when that was the 
 sole solution. 
 
 Yet, more than any contact hitherto 
 achieved, these counted instants struck her 
 as marking a step : they were built so just 
 in the mere flash on the recognition of his 
 now definitely knowing what it was she 
 would do for him. The anything, any 
 thing she had uttered in the Park went to 
 and fro between them and under the poked- 
 out chins that interposed. It had all at last 
 even put on the air of their not needing now 
 clumsily to manoeuvre to converse: their 
 former little postal make-believes, the 
 intense implications of questions and 
 answers and change, had become in the 
 light of the personal fact, of their having 
 had their moment, a possibility compara 
 tively poor. It was as if they had met for 
 all time it exerted on their being in pres 
 ence again an influence so prodigious. 
 When she watched herself, in the memory 
 of that night, walk away from him as if she 
 were making an end, she found something
 
 156 IN THE CAGE 
 
 too pitiful in the primness of such a gait. 
 Hadn t she precisely established on the part 
 of each a consciousness that could end only 
 with death? 
 
 It must be admitted, that, in spite of this 
 brave margin, an irritation, after he had 
 gone, remained with her; a sense that 
 presently became one with a still sharper 
 hatred of Mr. Buckton, who, on her friend s 
 withdrawal, had retired with the telegrams 
 to the sounder and left her the other work. 
 She knew indeed she should have a chance 
 to see them, when she would, on file; and 
 she was divided, as the day went on, between 
 the two impressions of all that was lost and 
 all that was reasserted. What beset her 
 above all, and as she had almost never 
 known it before, was the desire to bound 
 straight out, to overtake the autumn after 
 noon before it passed away for ever and 
 hurry off to the Park and perhaps be with 
 him there again on a bench. It became, 
 for an hour, a fantastic vision with her that 
 he might just have gone to sit and wait for
 
 IN THE CAGE 157 
 
 her. She could almost hear him, through 
 the tick of the sounder, scatter with his stick, 
 in his impatience, the fallen leaves of 
 October. Why should such a vision seize 
 her at this particular moment with such a 
 shake? There was a time from four to 
 five when she could have cried with happi 
 ness and rage. 
 
 Business quickened, it seemed, toward 
 five, as if the town did wake up; she had 
 therefore more to do, and she went through 
 it with little sharp stampings and jerkings: 
 she made the crisp postal-orders fairly snap 
 while she breathed to herself : It s the last 
 day the last day! The last day of what? 
 She couldn t have told. All she knew now 
 was that if she were out of the cage she 
 wouldn t in the least have minded, this time, 
 its not yet being dark. She would have 
 gone straight toward Park Chambers and 
 have hung about there till no matter when. 
 She would have waited, stayed, rung, asked, 
 have gone in, sat on the stairs. What the 
 day was the last of was probably, to her
 
 158 IN THE CAGE 
 
 strained inner sense, the group of golden 
 ones, of any occasion for seeing the hazy 
 sunshine slant at that angle into the smelly 
 shop, of any range of chances for his wish 
 ing still to repeat to her the two words 
 that, in the Park, she had scarcely let him 
 bring out. See here see here ! the sound 
 of these two words had been with her per 
 petually ; but it was in her ears to-day with 
 out mercy, with a loudness that grew and 
 grew. What was it they then expressed? 
 what was it he had wanted her to see? She 
 seemed, whatever it was, perfectly to see it 
 now to see that if she should just chuck 
 the whole thing, should have a great and 
 beautiful courage, he would somehow make 
 everything up to her. When the clock 
 struck five she was on the very point of say 
 ing to Mr. Buckton that she was deadly ill 
 and rapidly getting worse. This announce 
 ment was on her lips, and she had quite 
 composed the pale, hard face she would 
 offer him: I can t stop I must go home. 
 If I feel better, later on, I ll come back.
 
 IN THE CAGE 159 
 
 I m very sorry, but I must go. At that 
 instant Captain Everard once more stood 
 there, producing in her agitated spirit, by 
 his real presence, the strangest, quickest 
 revolution. He stopped her off without 
 knowing it, and by the time he had been a 
 minute in the shop she felt that she was 
 saved. 
 
 That was from the first minute what she 
 called it to herself. There were again other 
 persons with whom she was occupied, and 
 again the situation could only be expressed 
 by their silence. It was expressed, in fact, 
 in a larger phrase than ever yet, for her eyes 
 now spoke to him with a kind of supplica 
 tion. Be quiet, be quiet! they pleaded; 
 and they saw his own reply: I ll do what 
 ever you say; I won t even look at you 
 see, see! They kept conveying thus, with 
 the friendliest liberality, that they wouldn t 
 look, quite positively wouldn t. What she 
 was to see was that he hovered at the other 
 end of the counter, Mr. Buckton s end, 
 surrendered himself again to that frustra-
 
 160 IN THE CAGE 
 
 tion. It quickly proved so great indeed that 
 what she was to see further was how he 
 turned away before he was attended to, and 
 hung off, waiting, smoking, looking about 
 the shop; how he went over to Mr. Cocker s 
 own counter and appeared to price things, 
 gave in fact presently two or three orders 
 and put down money, stood there a long 
 time with his back to her, considerately 
 abstaining from any glance round to see if 
 she were free. It at last came to pass in 
 this way that he had remained in the shop 
 longer that she had ever yet known him to 
 do, and that, nevertheless, when he did turn 
 about she could see him time himself she 
 was freshly taken up and cross straight to 
 her postal subordinate, whom some one 
 else had released. He had in his hand all 
 this while neither letters nor telegrams, and 
 now that he was close to her for she was 
 close to the counter-clerk it brought her 
 heart into her mouth merely to see him look 
 at her neighbor and open his lips. She was 
 too nervous to bear it. He asked for a Post-
 
 IN THE CAGE 161 
 
 office Guide, and the young man whipped out 
 a new one; whereupon he said that he 
 wished not to purchase, but only to consult 
 one a moment; with which, the copy kept 
 on loan being produced, he once more wan 
 dered off. 
 
 What was he doing to her? What did he 
 want of her? Well, it was just the aggra 
 vation of his See here! She felt at this 
 moment strangely and portentously afraid 
 of him had in her ears the hum of a sense 
 that, should it come to that kind of tension, 
 she must fly on the spot to Chalk Farm. 
 Mixed with her dread and with her reflec 
 tion was the idea that, if he wanted her so 
 much as he seemed to show, it might be 
 after all simply to do for him the anything 
 she had promised, the everything she had 
 thought it so fine to bring out to Mr. Mudge. 
 He might want her to help him, might have 
 some particular appeal; though, of a truth, 
 his manner didn t denote that denoted on 
 the contrary, an embarrassment, an inde 
 cision, something of a desire not so much to
 
 i6a IN THE CAGE 
 
 be helped as to be treated rather more nicely 
 than she had treated him the other time. 
 Yes, he considered quite probably that he 
 had help rather to offer than to ask for. 
 Still, none the less, when he again saw her 
 free he continued to keep away from her, 
 when he came back with his Giiide it was 
 Mr. Buckton he caught it was from Mr. 
 Buckton he obtained half-a-crown s worth of 
 stamps. 
 
 After asking for the stamps he asked, quite 
 as a second thought, for a postal-order for 
 ten shillings. What did he want with so 
 many stamps when he wrote so few letters? 
 How could he enclose a postal-order in a 
 telegram? She expected him, the next 
 thing, to go into the corner and make up 
 one of his telegrams half-a-dozen of them 
 on purpose to prolong his presence. She 
 had so completely stopped looking at him 
 that she could only guess his movements 
 guess even where his eyes rested. Finally 
 she saw him make a dash that might have 
 been towards the nook where the forms
 
 IN THE CAGE 163 
 
 were hung; and at this she suddenly felt 
 that she couldn t keep it up. The counter- 
 clerk had just taken a telegram from a 
 slavey, and, to give herself something to 
 cover her, she snatched it out of his hand. 
 The gesture was so violent that he gave her 
 an odd look, and she also perceived that 
 Mr. Buckton noticed it. The latter person 
 age, with a quick stare at her, appeared for 
 an instant to wonder whether his snatching 
 it in his turn mightn t be the thing she 
 would least like, and she anticipated his 
 practical criticism by the frankest glare she 
 had ever given him. It sufficed: this time 
 it paralyzed him ; and she sought with her 
 trophy the refuge of the sounder.
 
 XXI 
 
 It was repeated the next day; it went on 
 for three days ; and at the end of that time 
 she knew what to think. When, at the 
 beginning-, she had emerged from her 
 temporary shelter Captain Everard had 
 quitted the shop ; and he had not come again 
 that evening, as it had struck her he possibly 
 might might all the more easily that there 
 were numberless persons who came, morn 
 ing and afternoon, numberless times, so that 
 he wouldn t necessarily have attracted atten 
 tion. The second day it was different, and 
 yet on the whole worse. His access to her 
 had become possible she felt herself even 
 reaping the fruit of her yesterday s glare at 
 Mr. Buckton; but transacting his business 
 with him didn t simplify it could, in spite 
 of the rigour of circumstance, feed so her 
 new conviction. The rigour was tremen 
 dous, and his telegrams not, now, mere 
 165
 
 166 IN THE CAGE 
 
 pretexts for getting at her were apparently 
 genuine ; yet the conviction had taken but a 
 night to develop. It could be simply 
 enough expressed; she had had the glim 
 mer of it the day before in her idea that he 
 needed no more help than she had already 
 given ; that it was help he himself was pre 
 pared to render. He had come up to town 
 but for three or four days; he had been 
 absolutely obliged to be absent after the 
 other time ; yet he would, now that he was 
 face to face with her, stay on as much 
 longer as she liked. Little by little it was 
 thus clarified, though from the first flash of 
 his reappearance she had read into it the 
 real essence. 
 
 That was what the night before, at eight 
 o clock, her hour to go, had made her hang 
 back and dawdle. She did last things or 
 pretended to do them ; to be in the cage had 
 suddenly become her safety, and she was 
 literally afraid of the alternate self who 
 might be waiting outside. He might be 
 waiting; it was he who was her alternate
 
 IN THE CAGE 167 
 
 self, and of him she was afraid. The most 
 extraordinary change had taken place in 
 her from the moment of her catching the 
 impression he seemed to have returned on 
 purpose to give her. Just before she had 
 done so, on that bewitched afternoon, she 
 had seen herself approach, without a scruple, 
 the porter at Park Chambers; then, as the 
 effect of the rush of a consciousness quite 
 altered, she had, on at last quitting Cocker s, 
 gone straight home for the first time since 
 her return from Bournemouth. She had 
 passed his door every night for weeks, but 
 nothing would have induced her to pass it 
 now. This change was the tribute of her 
 fear the result of a change in himself as to 
 which she needed no more explanation than 
 his mere face vividly gave her; strange 
 though it was to find an element of deter 
 rence in the object that she regarded as the 
 most beautiful in the world. He had taken 
 it from her in the Park that night that she 
 wanted him not to propose to her to sup; 
 but he had put away the lesson by this time
 
 168 IN THE CAGE 
 
 he practically proposed supper every time 
 he looked at her. This was what, for that 
 matter, mainly rilled the three days. He 
 came in twice on each of these, and it was as 
 if he came in to give her a chance to relent. 
 That was, after all, she said to herself in the 
 intervals, the most that he did. There 
 were ways, she fully recognised, in which 
 he spared her, and other particular ways as 
 to which she meant that her silence should 
 be full, to him, of exquisite pleading. The 
 most particular of all was his not being out 
 side, at the corner, when she quitted the 
 place for the night. This he might so easily 
 have been so easily if he hadn t been so 
 nice. She continued to recognise in his 
 forbearance the fruit of her dumb supplica 
 tion, and the only compensation he found 
 for it was the harmless freedom of being 
 able to appear to say: Yes, I m in town only 
 for three or four days, but, you know, I 
 would stay on. He struck her as calling 
 attention each day, each hour, to the rapid 
 ebb of time ; he exaggerated to the point of
 
 IN THE CAGE 169 
 
 putting it that there were only two days 
 more, that there was at last, dreadfully, 
 only one. 
 
 There were other things still that he 
 struck her as doing with a special intention ; 
 as to the most marked of which unless 
 indeed it were the most obscure she might 
 well have marvelled that it didn t seem to 
 her more horrid. It was either the frenzy 
 of her imagination or the disorder of his 
 baffled passion that gave her once or twice 
 the vision of his putting down redundant 
 money sovereigns not concerned with the 
 little payments he was perpetually making 
 so that she might give him some sign of 
 helping him to slip them over to her. 
 What was most extraordinary in this 
 impression was the amount of excuse that, 
 with some incoherence, she found for him. 
 He wanted to pay her because there was 
 nothing to pay her for. He wanted to offer 
 her things that he knew she wouldn t take. 
 He wanted to show her how much he 
 respected her by giving her the supreme
 
 1 7 o IN THE CAGE 
 
 chance to show him she was respectable. 
 Over the driest transactions, at any rate, 
 their eyes had out these questions. On the 
 third day he put iu a telegram that had evi 
 dently something of the same point as the 
 stray sovereigns a message that was, in 
 the first place, concocted and that, on a 
 second thought, he took back from her 
 before she had stamped it. He had given 
 her time to read it and had only then 
 bethought himself that he had better not 
 send it. If it was not to Lady Bradeen at 
 Twindle where she knew her ladyship then 
 to be this was because an address to Doctor 
 Buzzard at Brickwood was just as good, 
 with the added merit of its not giving away 
 quite so much a person whom he had still, 
 after all, in a manner to consider. It was 
 of course most complicated, only half 
 lighted; but there was, discernibly enough, 
 a scheme of communication in which Lady 
 Bradeen at Twindle and Dr. Buzzard at 
 Brickwood were, within limits, one and the 
 same person. The words he had shown
 
 IN THE CAGE 171 
 
 her and then taken back consisted, at all 
 events, of the brief but vivid phrase: Abso 
 lutely impossible. The point was not that 
 she should transmit it; the point was just 
 that she should see it. What was absolutely 
 impossible was that before he had settled 
 something at Cocker s he should go either 
 to Twindle or to Brickwood. 
 
 The logic of this, in turn, for herself, was 
 that she could lend herself to no settlement 
 so long as she so intensely knew. What 
 she knew was that he was, almost under 
 peril of life, clenched in a situation : there 
 fore how could she also know where a poor 
 girl in the P. O. might really stand? It was 
 more a nd more between them that if he 
 might convey to her that he was free, that 
 everything she had seen so deep into was a 
 closed chapter, her own case might become 
 different for her, she might understand and 
 meet him and listen. But he could convey 
 nothing of the sort, and he only fidgeted and 
 floundered in his want of power. The 
 chapter wasn t in the least closed, not for
 
 i 7 2 IN THE CAGE 
 
 the other party ; and the other party had a 
 pull, somehow and somewhere: this his 
 whole attitude and expression confessed, at 
 the same time that they entreated her not 
 to remember and not to mind. So long as 
 she did remember and did mind he could 
 only circle about and go and come, doing 
 futile things of which he was ashamed. 
 He was ashamed of his two words to Dr. 
 Buzzard, and went out of the shop as soon 
 as he had crumpled up the paper again and 
 thrust it into his pocket. It had been an 
 abject little exposure of dreadful, impossible 
 passion. He appeared in fact to be too 
 ashamed to come back. He had left town 
 again, and a first week elapsed, and a 
 second. He had had naturally to return to 
 the real mistress of his fate; she had insisted 
 she knew how, and he couldn t put in 
 another hour. There was always a day when 
 she called time. It was known to our young 
 friend moreover that he had now been des 
 patching telegrams from other offices. She 
 knew at last so much that she had quite lost
 
 IN THE CAGE 173 
 
 her earlier sense of merely guessing. There 
 were no shades of distinctness it all bounced 
 out.
 
 XXII 
 
 Eighteen days elapsed, and she had begun 
 to think it probable she should never see 
 him again. He too then understood now: 
 he had made out that she had secrets and 
 reasons and impediments, that even a poor 
 girl at the P. O. might have her complica 
 tions. With the charm she had cast on him 
 lightened by distance he had suffered a final 
 delicacy to speak to him, had made up his 
 mind that it would be only decent to let her 
 alone. Never so much as during these 
 latter days had she felt the precariousness 
 of their relation the happy, beautiful, 
 untroubled original one, if it could only 
 have been restored in which the public 
 servant and the casual public only were 
 concerned. It hung at the best by the 
 merest silken thread, which was at the 
 mercy of any accident and might snap at 
 
 any minute. She arrived by the end of the 
 
 175
 
 176 IN THE CAGE 
 
 fortnight at the highest sense of actual 
 fitness, never doubting that her decision was 
 now complete. She would just give him a 
 few days more to come back to her on a 
 proper impersonal basis for even to an 
 embarrassing representative of the casual 
 public a public servant with a conscience did 
 owe something and then would signify to 
 Mr. Mudge that she was ready for the little 
 home. It had been visited, in the further 
 talk she had had with him at Bournemouth, 
 from garret to cellar, and they had especially 
 lingered, with their respectively darkened 
 brows, before the niche into which it was to 
 be broached to her mother that she was to 
 find means to fit. 
 
 He had put it to her more definitely than 
 before that his calculations had allowed for 
 that dingy presence, and he had thereby 
 marked the greatest impression he had ever 
 made on her. It was a stroke superior even 
 again to his handling of the drunken soldier. 
 What she considered that, in the face of it, 
 she hung on at Cocker s for, was some-
 
 IN THE CAGE 177 
 
 thing that she could only have described as 
 the common fairness of a last word. Her 
 actual last word had been, till it should be 
 superseded, that she wouldn t abandon her 
 other friend, and it stuck to her, through 
 thick and thin, that she was still at her post 
 and on her honor. This other friend had 
 shown so much beauty of conduct already 
 that he would surely, after all, just reappear 
 long enough to relieve her, to give her 
 something she could take away. She saw 
 it, caught it, at times, his parting present; 
 and there were moments when she felt her 
 self sitting like a beggar with a hand held 
 out to an almsgiver who only fumbled. She 
 hadn t taken the sovereigns, but she would 
 take the penny. She heard, in imagination, 
 on the counter, the ring of the copper. 
 Don t put yourself out any longer, he 
 would say, for so bad a case. You ve done 
 all there is to be done. I thank and acquit 
 and release you. Our lives take us. I don t 
 know much though I have really been 
 interested about yours ; but I suppose
 
 178 IN THE CAGE 
 
 you ve got one. Mine, at any rate, will take 
 me and where it will. Heigh-ho! Good 
 bye. And then once more, for the sweet 
 est, faintest flower of all: Only I say see 
 here!" She had framed the whole picture 
 with a squareness that included also the 
 image of how again she would decline to 
 see there, decline, as she might say, to see 
 anywhere or anything. Yet it befell that 
 just in the fury of this escape she saw more 
 than ever. 
 
 He came back one night with a rush, near 
 the moment of their closing, and showed her 
 a face so different and new, so upset and 
 anxious, that almost anything seemed to 
 look out of it but clear recognition. He 
 poked in a telegram very much as if the 
 simple sense of pressure, the distress of 
 extreme haste, had blurred the remembrance 
 of where in particular he was. But as she 
 met his eyes a light came; it broke indeed 
 on the spot into a positive, conscious glare. 
 That made up for everything, for it was an 
 instant proclamation of the celebrated dan-
 
 IN THE CAGE 179 
 
 ger ; it seemed to pour things out in a flood. 
 Oh yes, here it is it s upon me at last! 
 Forget, for God s sake, my having worried 
 or bored you, and just help me, just save 
 me, by getting this off without the loss of a 
 second ! Something grave had clearly 
 occurred, a crisis declared itself. She 
 recognized immediately the person to whom 
 the telegram was addressed the Miss Dol 
 man, of Parade Lodge, to whom Lady 
 Bradeen had wired, at Dover, on the last 
 occasion, and whom she had then, with her 
 recollection of previous arrangements, fitted 
 into a particular setting. Miss Dolman had 
 figured before and not figured since, but she 
 was now the subject of an imperative appeal. 
 Absolutely necessary to see you. Take last 
 train Victoria if you can catch it. If not, 
 earliest morning, and answer me direct 
 either way. 
 
 Reply paid? said the girl. Mr. Buckton 
 had just departed, and the counter - clerk 
 was at the sounder. There was no other 
 representative of the public and she had
 
 i8o IN THE CAGE 
 
 never yet, as it seemed to her, not even in 
 the street or in the Park, been so alone with 
 him. 
 
 Oh yes, reply paid, and as sharp as possi 
 ble, please. 
 
 She affixed the stamps in a flash She ll 
 catch the train! she then declared to him 
 breathlessly, as if she could absolutely guar 
 antee it. 
 
 I don t know I hope so. It s awfully 
 important. So kind of you. Awfully sharp, 
 please. It was wonderfully innocent now, 
 his oblivion of all but his danger. Anything 
 else that had ever passed between them was 
 utterly out of it. Well, she had wanted him 
 to be impersonal ! 
 
 There was less of the same need, there 
 fore, happily for herself ; yet she only took 
 time, before she flew to the sounder, to gasp 
 at him: You re in trouble? 
 
 Horrid, there s a row! But they parted, 
 on it, in the next breath, and as she dashed 
 at the sounder, almost pushing, in her 
 violence, the counter-clerk off the stool, she
 
 IN THE CAGE 181 
 
 caught the bang with which, at Cocker s 
 door, in his further precipitation, he closed 
 the apron of the cab into which he had 
 leaped. As he rushed off to some other 
 precaution suggested by his alarm his appeal 
 to Miss Dolman flashed straight away. 
 
 But she had not on the morrow, been in 
 the place five minutes before he was with 
 her again, still more discomposed and quite, 
 now, as she said to herself, like a frightened 
 child coming to its mother. Her compan 
 ions were there, and she felt it to be 
 remarkable how, in the presence of his 
 agitation, his mere scared, exposed nature, 
 she suddenly ceased to mind. It came to her 
 as it had never come to her before that with 
 absolute directness and assurance they might 
 carry almost anything off. He had nothing 
 to send she was sure he had been wiring 
 all over and yet his business was evidently 
 huge. There was nothing but that in his 
 eyes not a glimmer of reference or memory. 
 He was almost haggard with anxiety and 
 had clearly not slept a wink. Her pity for
 
 182 IN THE CAGE 
 
 him would have given her any courage, and 
 she seemed to know at last why she had been 
 such a fool. She didn t come ? she panted. 
 
 Oh yes, she came, but there has been 
 some mistake. We want a telegram. 
 
 A telegram? 
 
 One that was sent from here ever so long 
 ago. There was something in it that has to 
 be recovered. Something very, very im 
 portant, please we want it immediately. 
 
 He really spoke to her as if she had been 
 some strange young woman at Knights- 
 bridge or Paddington ; but it had no other 
 effect on her than to give her the measure of 
 his tremendous flurry. Then it was that, 
 above all, she felt how much she had missed 
 in the gaps and blanks and absent answers 
 how much she had had to dispense with : it 
 was black darkness now, save for this little 
 wild red flare. So much as that she saw and 
 possessed. One of the lovers was quaking 
 somewhere out of town, and the other was 
 quaking just where he stood. This was 
 vivid enough, and after an instant she knew
 
 IN THE CAGE 183 
 
 it was all she wanted. She wanted no 
 detail, no fact she wanted no nearer vision 
 of discovery or shame. When was your 
 telegram? Do you mean you sent it from 
 here? She tried to do the young woman at 
 Knightsbridge. 
 
 k Oh yes, from here several weeks ago. 
 Five, six, seven he was confused and 
 impatient don t you remember? 
 
 Remember? she could scarcely keep out 
 of her face, at the word, the strangest of 
 smiles. 
 
 But the way he didn t catch what it meant 
 was perhaps even stranger still. I mean, 
 don t you keep the old ones? 
 
 For a certain time. 
 
 But how long? 
 
 She thought; she must do the young 
 woman, and she knew exactly what the 
 young woman would say and, still more, 
 wouldn t. Can you give me the date? 
 
 Oh God, no! It was some time or other 
 in August toward the end. It was to the 
 same address as the one I gave you last night.
 
 1 84 IN THE CAGE 
 
 Oh! said the girl, knowing at this the 
 deepest thrill she had ever felt. It came to 
 her there, with her eyes on his face, that 
 she held the whole thing in her hand, held 
 it as she held her pencil, which might have 
 broken at that instant in her tightened grip. 
 This made her feel like the very fountain 
 of fate, but the emotion was such a flood 
 that she had to press it back with all her 
 force. That was positively the reason, 
 again, of her flute-like Paddington tone. 
 
 You can t give us anything a little 
 nearer? Her little and her us came 
 straight from Paddington. These things 
 were no false note for him his difficulty 
 absorbed them all. The eyes with which 
 he pressed her, and in the depths of which 
 she read terror and rage and literal tears, 
 were just the same he would have shown any 
 other prim person. 
 
 I don t know the date. I only know the 
 thing went from here, and just about the 
 time I speak of. It wasn t delivered, you 
 see. We ve got to recover it.
 
 XXIII 
 
 She was as struck with the beauty of his 
 plural pronoun as she had judged he might 
 be with that of her own ; but she knew now 
 so well what she was about that she could 
 almost play with him and with her new 
 born joy. You say "about the time you 
 speak of." But I don t think you speak of 
 an exact time do you? 
 
 He looked splendidly helpless. That s 
 just what I want to find out. Don t you 
 keep the old ones? can t you look it up? 
 
 Our young lady still at Paddington 
 turned the question over. It wasn t deliv 
 ered? 
 
 Yts it was; yet, at the same time, don t 
 you know? it wasn t. He jnist hung back, 
 but he brought it out. I mean it was 
 intercepted, don t you know? and there was 
 something in it. He paused again and, as 
 
 if to further his quest and woo and suppli- 
 85
 
 1 86 IN THE CAGE 
 
 cate success and recovery, even smiled with 
 an effort at the agreeable that was almost 
 ghastly and that turned the knife in her 
 tenderness. What must be the pain of it 
 all, of the open gulf and the throbbing 
 fever, when this was the mere hot breath? 
 We want to get what was in it to know 
 what it was. 
 
 I see I see." She managed just the 
 accent they had at Paddington when they 
 stared like dead fish. And you have no 
 clue? 
 
 Not at all I ve the clue I ve just given 
 you. 
 
 Oh, the last of August? If she kept it 
 up long enough she would make him really 
 angry. 
 
 Yes, and the address, as I ve said. 
 
 Oh, the same as last night? 
 
 He visibly quivered, as if with a gleam 
 of hope; but it only poured oil on her 
 quietude, and she was still deliberate. She 
 ranged some papers. Won t you look? he 
 went on.
 
 IN THE CAGE 187 
 
 I remember your coming, she replied. 
 
 He blinked with a new uneasiness; it 
 might have begun to come to him, through 
 her difference, that he was somehow differ 
 ent himself. You were much quicker then, 
 you know ! 
 
 So were you you must do me that 
 justice, she answered with a smile. But 
 let me see. Wasn t it Dover? 
 
 Yes, Miss Dolman 
 
 Parade Lodge, Parade Terrace? 
 
 Exactly thank you so awfully much! 
 He began to hope again. Then you have 
 it the other one? 
 
 She hesitated afresh; she quite dangled 
 him. It was brought by a lady? 
 
 Yes; and she put in by mistake some 
 thing wrong. That s what we ve got to get 
 hold of! 
 
 Heavens, what was he going to say? 
 flooding poor Paddington with wild be 
 trayals ! She couldn t too much, for her joy, 
 dangle him, yet she couldn t either, for his 
 dignity, warn or control or check him.
 
 i88 IN THE CAGE 
 
 What she found herself doing was just to 
 treat herself to the middle way. It was 
 intercepted? 
 
 It fell into the wrong hands. But there s 
 something in it, he continued to blurt out, 
 that may be all right. That is if it s wrong, 
 don t you know? It s all right if it s wrong, 
 he remarkably explained. 
 
 What was he, on earth, going to say? Mr. 
 Buckton and the counter-clerk were already 
 interested ; no one would have the decency 
 to come in ; and she was divided between 
 her particular terror for him and her general 
 curiosity. Yet she already saw with what 
 brilliancy she could add, to carry the thing 
 off, a little false knowledge to all her real. 
 I quite understand, she said with benev 
 olent, with almost patronizing quickness. 
 The lady has forgotten what she did put. 
 
 Forgotten most wretchedly, and it s an 
 immense inconvenience. It has only just 
 been found that it didn t get there ; so that 
 if we could immediately have it 
 
 Immediately?
 
 IN THE CAGE 189 
 
 Every minute counts. You have, he 
 pleaded, surely got them on file. 
 
 So that you can see it on the spot? 
 
 Yes, please this very minute. The 
 counter rang with his knuckles, with the 
 knob of his stick, with his panic of alarm. 
 
 4 Do, do hunt it up ! he repeated. 
 
 I dare say we could get it for you, the 
 girl sweetly returned. 
 
 Get it ? he looked aghast. When ? 
 
 Probably by to-morrow. 
 
 Then it isn t here? his face was pitiful. 
 
 She caught only the uncovered gleams 
 that peeped out of the blackness, and she 
 wondered what complication, even among 
 the most supposable, the very worst, could 
 be bad enough to account for the degree 
 of his terror. There were twists and turns, 
 there were places where the screw drew 
 blood, that she couldn t guess. She was 
 more and more glad she didn t want to. It 
 has been sent on. 
 
 But how do you know if you don t look? 
 
 She gave him a smile that was meant to
 
 i 9 o IN THE CAGE 
 
 be, in the absolute irony of its propriety, 
 quite divine. It was August 23rd, and we 
 have nothing later here than August 27th. 
 
 Something leaped into his face. 27th 
 23rd? Then you re sure? You know? 
 
 She felt she scarce knew what as if she 
 might soon be pounced upon for some lurid 
 connection with a scandal. It was the 
 queerest of all sensations, for she had heard, 
 she had read, of these things and the wealth 
 of her intimacy with them at Cocker s might 
 be supposed to have schooled and seasoned 
 her. This particular one that she had really 
 quite lived with was, after all, an old story ; 
 yet what it had been before was dim and 
 distant beside the touch under which she 
 now winced. Scandal? it had never been 
 but a silly word. Now it was a great palpa 
 ble surface, and the surface was somehow, 
 Captain Everhard s wonderful face. Deep 
 down in his eyes was a picture, the vision of 
 a great place like a chamber of justice, 
 where, before a watching crowd, a poor girl, 
 exposed but heroic, swore with a quavering
 
 IN THE CAGE 191 
 
 voice to a document, proved an alibi, sup 
 plied a link. In this picture she bravely 
 took her place. It was the 23rd. 
 
 Then can t you get it this morning or 
 some time to-day? 
 
 She considered, still holding him with her 
 look, which she then turned on her two 
 companions, who were by this time unre 
 servedly enlisted. She didn t care not a 
 scrap, and she glanced about for a piece of 
 paper. With this she had to recognize the 
 rigour of official thrift a morsel of black 
 ened blotter was the only loose paper to be 
 seen. Have you got a card? she said to 
 her visitor. He was quite away from Pad- 
 dington now, and the next instant, with a 
 pocket-pook in his hand, he had whipped a 
 card out. She gave no glance at the name 
 on it only turned it to the other side. She 
 continued to hold him, she felt at present, as 
 she had never held him ; and her command 
 of her colleagues was, for the moment, not 
 less marked. She wrote something on the 
 back of the card and pushed it across to him.
 
 i 9 2 IN THE CAGE 
 
 He fairly glared at it. Seven, nine, 
 four 
 
 Nine, six, one she obligingly completed 
 the number. Is it right? she smiled. 
 
 He took the whole thing in with a flushed 
 intensity; then there broke out in him a 
 visibility of relief that was simply a tremen 
 dous exposure. He shone at them all like 
 a tall lighthouse, embracing even, for sym 
 pathy, the blinking young man. By all the 
 powers it s wrong! And without another 
 look, without a word of thanks, without 
 time for anything or anybody, he turned on 
 them the broad back of his great stature, 
 straightened his triumphant shoulders and 
 strode out of the place. 
 
 She was left confronted with her habitual 
 critics. "If it s wrong it s all right!" she 
 extravagantly quoted to them. 
 
 The counter-clerk was really awe-stricken. 
 But how did you know, dear? 
 
 I remembered, love! 
 
 Mr. Buckton, on the contrary, was rude. 
 And what game is that, Miss?
 
 IN THE CAGE 193 
 
 No happiness she had ever known came 
 within miles of it, and some minutes elapsed 
 before she could recall herself sufficiently 
 to reply that it was none of his business.
 
 XXIV 
 
 If life at Cocker s with the dreadful drop 
 of August, had lost something of its savour, 
 she had not been slow to infer that a heavier 
 blight had fallen on the graceful industry of 
 Mrs. Jordan. With Lord Rye and Lady 
 Ventnor and Mrs. Bubb all out of town, 
 with the blinds down on all the homes of 
 luxury, this ingenious woman might well 
 have found her wonderful taste left quite on 
 her hands. She bore up, however, in a way 
 that began by exciting much of her young 
 friend s esteem; they perhaps even more 
 frequently met as the wine of life flowed 
 less free from other sources, and each, in 
 the lack of better diversion, carried on with 
 more mystification for the other an inter 
 course that consisted not a little of peeping 
 out and drawing back. Each waited for 
 the other to commit herself, each profusely 
 
 curtained for the other the limits of low 
 195
 
 196 IN THE CAGE 
 
 horizons. Mrs. Jordan was indeed probably 
 the more reckless skirmisher ; nothing could 
 exceed her frequent incoherence unless it 
 was indeed her occasional bursts of con 
 fidence. Her account of her private affairs 
 rose and fell like a flame in the wind 
 sometimes the bravest bonfire and some 
 times a handful of ashes. This our young 
 woman took to be an effect of the position, 
 at one moment and another, of the famous 
 door of the great world. She had been 
 struck in one of her ha penny volumes with 
 the translation of a French proverb accord 
 ing to which a door had to be either open or 
 shut; and it seemed a part of the precari- 
 ousness of Mrs. Jordan s life that hers mostly 
 managed to be neither. There had been 
 occasions when it appeared to gape wide 
 fairly to woo her across its threshold ; there 
 had been others, of an order distinctly dis 
 concerting, when it was all but banged in 
 her face. On the whole, however, she had 
 evidently not lost heart ; these still belonged 
 to the class of things in spite of which she
 
 IN THE CAGE 197 
 
 looked well. She intimated that the profits 
 of her trade had swollen so as to float her 
 through any state of the tide, and she had, 
 besides this, a hundred profundities and 
 explanations. 
 
 She rose superior, above all, on the happy 
 fact that there were always gentlemen in 
 town and that gentlemen were her greatest 
 admirers ; gentlemen from the city in 
 especial as to whom she was full of in 
 formation about the passion and pride 
 excited in such breasts by the objects of 
 her charming commerce. The city men 
 did, in short, go in for flowers. There 
 was a certain type of awfully smart stock 
 broker Lord Rye called them Jews and 
 bounders, but she didn t care whose 
 extravagance, she more than once threw 
 out, had really, if one had any conscience, 
 to be forcibly restrained. It was not per 
 haps a pure love of beauty : it was a matter 
 of vanity and a sign of business; they 
 wished to crush their rivals, and that was 
 one of their weapons. Mrs. Jordan s
 
 198 IN THE CAGE 
 
 shrewdness was extreme ; she knew, in any 
 case, her customer she dealt, as she said, 
 with all sorts; and it was, at the worst, a 
 race for her a race even in the dull months 
 from one set of chambers to another. And 
 then, after all, there were also still the 
 ladies; the ladies of stockbroking circles 
 were perpetually up and down. They were 
 not quite perhaps Mrs. Bubb or Lady Vent- 
 nor; but you couldn t tell the difference 
 unless you quarrelled with them, and then 
 you knew it only by their making up sooner. 
 These ladies formed the branch of her sub 
 ject on which she most swayed in the breeze ; 
 to that degree that her confidant had ended 
 with an inference or two tending to banish 
 regret for opportunities not embraced. 
 There were indeed tea - gowns that Mrs. 
 Jordan described but tea-gowns were not 
 the whole of respectability, and it was odd 
 that a clergyman s widow should sometimes 
 speak as if she almost thought so. She 
 came back, it was true, unfailingly, to Lord 
 Rye, never, evidently, quite losing sight of
 
 IN THE CAGE 199 
 
 him even on the longest excursions. That 
 he was kindness itself had become in fact 
 the very moral it all pointed pointed in 
 strange flashes of the poor woman s near 
 sighted eyes. She launched at her young 
 friend many portentous looks, solemn 
 heralds of some extraordinary communica 
 tion. The communication itself, from week 
 to week, hung fire ; but it was to the facts 
 over which it hovered that she owed her 
 power of going on. They are, in one way 
 and another, she often emphasised, a tower 
 of strength ; and as the allusion was to the 
 aristocracy the girl could quite wonder why, 
 if they were so in one way, they should 
 require to be so in two. She thoroughly 
 knew, however, how many ways Mrs. Jordan 
 counted in. It all meant simply that her 
 fate was pressing her close. If that fate 
 was to be sealed at the matrimonial altar 
 it was perhaps not remarkable that she 
 shouldn t come all at once to the scratch of 
 overwhelming a mere telegraphist. It 
 would necessarily present to such a person
 
 200 IN THE CAGE 
 
 a prospect of regretful sacrifice. Lord Rye 
 if it was Lord Rye wouldn t be kind to 
 a nonentity of that sort, even though people 
 quite as good had been. 
 
 One Sunday afternoon in November they 
 went, by arrangement, to church together; 
 after which on the inspiration of the mo 
 ment ; the arrangement had not included it 
 they proceeded to Mrs. Jordan s lodging in 
 the region of Maida Vale. She had raved to 
 her friend about her service of predilection ; 
 she was excessively high and had more 
 than once wished to introduce the girl to the 
 same comfort and privilege. There was a 
 thick brown fog, and Maida Vale tasted of 
 acrid smoke; but they had been sitting 
 among chants and incense and wonderful 
 music, during which, though the effect of 
 such things on her mind was great, our 
 young lady had indulged in a series of 
 reflections but indirectly related to them. 
 One of these was the result of Mrs. Jordan s 
 having said to her on the way, and with a 
 certain fine significance, that Lord Rye had
 
 IN THE CAGE 201 
 
 been for some time in town. She had 
 spoken as if it were a circumstance to which 
 little required to be added as if the bearing 
 of such an item on her life might easily be 
 grasped. Perhaps it was the wonder of 
 whether Lord Rye wished to marry her that 
 made her guest, with thoughts straying to 
 that quarter, quite determine that some 
 other nuptials also should take place at St. 
 Julian s. Mr. Mudge was still an attendant 
 at his Wesleyan chapel, but this was the 
 least of her worries it had never even 
 vexed her enough for her to so much as 
 name it to Mrs. Jordan. Mr. Mudge s form 
 of worship was one of several things they 
 made up in superiority and beauty for what 
 they wanted in number that she had long 
 ago settled he should take from her, and 
 she had now moreover for the first time 
 definitely established her own. Its princi 
 pal feature was that it was to be the same 
 as that of Mrs. Jordan and Lord Rye ; which 
 was indeed very much what she said to her 
 hostess as they sat together later on. The
 
 202 IN THE CAGE 
 
 brown fog was in this hostess s little par 
 lour, where it acted as a postponement of 
 the question of there being, besides, any 
 thing else than the teacups and a pewter 
 pot, and a very black little fire, and a 
 paraffin lamp without a shade. There was at 
 any rate no sign of a flower; it was not for 
 herself Mrs. Jordan gathered sweets. The 
 girl waited till they had had a cup of tea 
 waited for the announcement that she fairly 
 believed her friend had, this time, possessed 
 herself of her formally at last to make ; but 
 nothing came, after the interval, save a little 
 poke at the fire, which was like the clearing 
 of the throat for a speech.
 
 XXV 
 
 I think you must have heard me speak 
 of Mr. Drake ? Mrs. Jordan had never 
 looked so queer, nor her smile so suggestive 
 of a large benevolent bite. 
 
 Mr. Drake? Oh yes; isn t he a friend of 
 Lord Rye? 
 
 A great and trusted friend. Almost I 
 may say a loved friend. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan s almost had such an oddity 
 that her companion was moved, rather flip 
 pantly perhaps, to take it up. Don t people 
 as good as love their friends when they 
 "trust" them? 
 
 It pulled up a little the eulogist of Mr. 
 Drake. Well, my dear, I love you 
 
 But you don t trust me? the girl unmer 
 cifully asked. 
 
 Again Mrs. Jordan paused still she 
 looked queer. Yes, she replied with a cer 
 tain austerity ; that s exactly what I m
 
 204 IN THE CAGE 
 
 about to give you rather a remarkable proof 
 of. The sense of its being remarkable was 
 already so strong that, while she bridled a 
 little, this held her auditor in a momentary 
 muteness of submission. Mr. Drake has 
 rendered his lordship, for several years, 
 services that his lordship has highly appre 
 ciated and that make it all the more a 
 unexpected that they should, perhaps a little 
 suddenly, separate. 
 
 Separate? Our young lady was mysti 
 fied, but she tried to be interested ; and she 
 already saw that she had put the saddle on 
 the wrong horse. She had heard something 
 of Mr. Drake, who was a member of his 
 lordship s circle the member with whom, 
 apparently, Mrs. Jordan s avocations had 
 most happened to throw her. She was only 
 a little puzzled at the separation. Well, 
 at any rate, she smiled, if they separate as 
 friends ! 
 
 Oh, his lordship takes the greatest 
 interest in Mr. Drake s future. He ll do 
 anything for him ; he has, in fact, just done
 
 IN THE CAGE 205 
 
 a great deal. There must, you know, be 
 changes ! 
 
 No one knows it better than I, the girl 
 said. She wished to draw her interlocutress 
 out. There will be changes enough for 
 me. 
 
 You re leaving Cocker s? 
 
 The ornament of that establishment 
 waited a moment to answer, and then it 
 was indirect. Tell me what you re doing. 
 
 Well, what will you think of it? 
 
 Why, that you ve found the opening you 
 were always so sure of. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan, on this, appeared to muse 
 with embarrassed intensity. I was always 
 sure, yes and yet I often wasn t! 
 
 Well, I hope you re sure now. Sure, I 
 mean, of Mr. Drake. 
 
 Yes, my dear, I think I may say I am. 
 I kept him going till I was. 
 
 Then he s yours? 
 
 My very own. 
 
 How nice ! And awfully rich ! our young 
 woman went on.
 
 2o6 IN THE CAGE 
 
 Mrs. Jordan showed promptly enough 
 that she loved for higher things. Awfully 
 handsome six foot two. And he has put by. 
 
 Quite like Mr. Mudge, then! that gentle 
 man s friend rather desperately exclaimed. 
 
 Oh, not quite! Mr. Drake s was ambigu 
 ous about it, but the name of Mr. Mudge had 
 evidently given her some sort of stimulus. 
 He ll have more opportunity now, at any 
 rate. He s going to Lady Bradeen. 
 
 To Lady Bradeen? This was bewilder 
 ment. "Going ?" 
 
 The girl had seen, from the way Mrs. 
 Jordan looked at her, that the effect of the 
 name had been to make her let something 
 out. Do you know her? 
 
 She hesitated; then she found her feet. 
 
 Well, you ll remember I ve often told 
 you that if you had grand clients, I have 
 them too. 
 
 Yes, said Mrs. Jordan; but the great 
 difference is that you hate yours, whereas I 
 really love mine. Do you know Lady 
 Bradeen? she pursued.
 
 IN THE CAGE 207 
 
 Down to the ground! She s always in 
 and out. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan s foolish eyes confessed, in 
 fixing themselves on this sketch, to a degree 
 of wonder and even of envy. But she bore 
 up and, with a certain gaiety, Do you hate 
 her? she demanded. 
 
 Her visitor s reply was prompt. Dear 
 no not nearly so much as some of them. 
 She s too outrageously beautiful. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan continued to gaze. Out 
 rageously? 
 
 Well, yes; deliciously. What was really 
 delicious was Mrs. Jordan s vagueness. 
 You don t know her you ve not seen her? 
 her guest lightly continued. 
 
 No, but I ve heard a great deal about 
 her. 
 
 So have I ! our young lady exclaimed. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan looked an instant as if she 
 suspected her good faith, or at least her 
 seriousness. You know some friend ? 
 
 Of Lady Bradeen s? Oh, yes, I know one. 
 
 Only one?
 
 208 IN THE CAGE 
 
 The girl laughed out. Only one but 
 he s so intimate. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan just hesitated. He s a gen 
 tleman? 
 
 Yes, he s not a lady. 
 
 Her interlocutress appeared to muse. 
 She s immensely surrounded. 
 
 She will be with Mr. Drake! 
 
 Mrs. Jordan s gaze became strangely fixed. 
 Is she very good-looking? 
 
 The handsomest person I know. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan continued to contemplate. 
 Well, /know some beauties. Then, with 
 her odd jerkiness, Do you think she looks 
 good? she inquired. 
 
 Because that s not always the case with 
 the good-looking? the other took it up. 
 No, indeed, it isn t: that s one thing Cock 
 er s has taught me. Still, there are some 
 people who have everything. Lady Bra- 
 deen, at any rate, has enough: eyes and a 
 nose and a mouth, a complexion, a figure 
 
 A figure? Mrs. Jordan almost broke in. 
 
 A figure, a head of hair! The girl made
 
 IN THE CAGE 209 
 
 a little conscious motion that seemed to let 
 the hair all down, and her companion 
 watched the wonderful show. But Mr. 
 Drake is another ? 
 
 Another? Mrs. Jordan s thoughts had 
 to come back from a distance. 
 
 Of her ladyship s admirers. He s "go 
 ing," you say, to her? 
 
 At this Mrs. Jordan really faltered. She 
 has engaged him. 
 
 Engaged him? our young woman was 
 quite at sea. 
 
 In the same capacity as Lord Rye. 
 
 And was Lord Rye engaged?
 
 XXVI 
 
 Mrs. Jordan looked away from her now 
 looked, she thought, rather injured and, as 
 if trifled with, even a little angry. The 
 mention of Lady Bradeen had frustrated 
 for a while the convergence of our heroine s 
 thoughts; but with this impression of her 
 old friend s combined impatience and diffi 
 dence they began again to whirl round her, 
 and continued it till one of them appeared 
 to dart at her, out of the dance, as if with 
 a sharp peck. It came to her with a lively 
 shock, with a positive sting, that Mr. Drake 
 was could it be possible? With the idea 
 she found herself afresh on the edge of 
 laughter, of a sudden and strange perversity 
 of mirth. Mr. Drake loomed, in a swift 
 image, before her ; such a figure as she had 
 seen in open doorways of houses in Cock 
 er s quarter majestic, middle-aged, erect, 
 flanked on either side by a footman and
 
 212 IN THE CAGE 
 
 taking the name of a visitor. Mr. Drake 
 then verily was a person who opened the 
 door! Before she had time, however, to 
 recover from the effect of her evocation, 
 she was offered a vision which quite en 
 gulfed it. It was communicated to her 
 somehow that the face with which she had 
 seen it rise prompted Mrs. Jordan to dash, at 
 a venture, at something that might attenu 
 ate criticism. Lady Bradeen is rearranging 
 she s going to be married. 
 
 Married? The girl echoed it ever so 
 soltly, but there it was at last. Didn t you 
 know it? 
 
 She summoned all her sturdiness. No, 
 she hasn t told me. 
 
 And her friends haven t they? 
 
 I haven t seen any of them lately. I m 
 not so fortunate as you. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan gathered herself. Then you 
 haven t even heard of Lord Bradeen s 
 death? 
 
 Her comrade, unable for a moment to 
 speak, gave a slow headshake. You know
 
 IN THE CAGE 213 
 
 it from Mr. Drake? It was better surely 
 not to learn things at all than to learn them 
 by the butler. She tells him everything. 
 
 And he tells yon I see. Our young lady 
 got up ; recovering her muff and her gloves, 
 she smiled. Well, I haven t, unfortunately, 
 any Mr. Drake. I congratulate you with all 
 my heart. Even without your sort of assist 
 ance, however, there s a trifle here and there 
 that I do pick up. I gather that if she s to 
 marry any one, it must quite necessarily be 
 my friend. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan was now also on her feet. 
 Is Captain Everard your friend? 
 
 The girl considered, drawing on a glove. 
 I saw at one time an immense deal of him. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan looked hard at the glove, but 
 she had not, after all, waited for that to be 
 sorry it was not cleaner. What time was 
 that? 
 
 It must have been the time you were 
 seeing so much of Mr. Drake. She had 
 now fairly taken it in: the distinguished 
 person Mrs, Jordan was to marry would
 
 214 IN THE CAGE 
 
 answer bells and put on coals and superin 
 tend, at least, the cleaning of boots for the 
 other distinguished person whom she might 
 well, whom she might have had, if she had 
 wished, so much more to say to. Good 
 bye, she added; good-bye. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan, however, again taking her 
 muff from her, turned it over, brushed it off 
 and thoughtfully peeped into it. Tell me 
 this before you go. You spoke just now of 
 your own changes. Do you mean that Mr. 
 Mudge ? 
 
 Mr. Mudge has had great patience with 
 me he has brought me at last to the point. 
 We re to be married next month and have a 
 nice little home. But he s only a grocer, 
 you know the girl met her friend s intent 
 eyes so that I m afraid that, with the set 
 you ve got into, you won t see your way to 
 keep up our friendship. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan for a moment made no answer 
 to this ; she only held the muff up to her 
 face, after which she gave it back. You 
 don t like it. I see, I see.
 
 IN THE CAGE 215 
 
 To her guest s astonishment there were 
 tears now in her eyes. I don t like what? 
 the girl asked. 
 
 Why, my engagement. Only, with your 
 great cleverness, the poor lady quavered 
 out, you put it in your own way. I mean 
 
 that you ll cool off. You already have ! 
 
 And on this, the next instant, her tears 
 began to flow. She succumbed to them and 
 collapsed; she sank down again, burying 
 her face and trying to smother her sobs. 
 
 Her young friend stood there, still in some 
 rigour, but taken much by surprise even if 
 not yet fully moved to pity. I don t put 
 anything in any "way," and I m very glad 
 you re suited. Only, you know, you did put 
 to me so splendidly what, even for me, if I 
 had listened to you, it might lead to. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan kept up a mild, thin, weak 
 wail ; then, drying her eyes, as feebly con 
 sidered this reminder. It has led to my 
 not starving! she faintly gasped. 
 
 Our young lady, at this, dropped into the 
 place beside her, and now, in a rush, the
 
 216 IN THE CAGE 
 
 small, silly misery was clear. She took her 
 hand as a sign of pitying it, then, after 
 another instant, confirmed this expression 
 with a consoling kiss. They sat there 
 together; they looked out, hand in hand, 
 into the damp, dusky, shabby little room 
 and into the future, of no such very different 
 suggestion, at last accepted by each. There 
 was no definite utterance, on either side, of 
 Mr. Drake s position in the great world, but 
 the temporary collapse of his prospective 
 bride threw all further necessary light ; and 
 what our heroine saw and felt for in the 
 whole business was the vivid reflection of 
 her own dreams and delusions and her own 
 return to reality. Reality, for the poor 
 things they both were, could only be ugli 
 ness and obscurity, could never be the 
 escape, the rise. She pressed her friend 
 she had tact enough for that with no other 
 personal question, brought on no need of 
 further revelations, only just continued to 
 hold and comfort her and to acknowledge 
 by stiff little forbearances the common
 
 IN THE CAGE 217 
 
 element in their fate. She felt indeed mag 
 nanimous in such matters; for if it was very 
 well, for condolence or reassurance, to 
 suppress just then invidious shrinkings, 
 she yet by no means saw herself sitting 
 down, as she might say, to the same table 
 with Mr. Drake. There would luckily, to 
 all appearance, be little question of tables; 
 and the circumstance that, on their peculiar 
 lines, her friend s interests would still attach 
 themselves to Mayfair flung over Chalk 
 Farm the first radiance it had shown. Where 
 was one s pride and one s passion when the 
 real way to judge of one s luck was by 
 making not the wrong, but the right, com 
 parison? Before she had again gathered 
 herself to go she felt very small and cautious 
 and thankful. We shall have our own 
 house, she said, and you must come very 
 soon and let me show it you. 
 
 We shall have our own too, Mrs. Jordan 
 replied; for, don t you know, he makes it 
 a condition that he sleeps out? 
 
 A condition? the girl felt out of it.
 
 2i8 IN THE CAGE 
 
 For any new position. It was on that he 
 parted with Lord Rye. His lordship can t 
 meet it; so Mr. Drake has given him up. 
 
 And all for you? our young woman put 
 it as cheerfully as possible. 
 
 For me and Lady Bradeen. Her Lady 
 ship s too glad to get him at any price. Lord 
 Rye, out of interest in us, has in fact quite 
 made her take him. So, as I tell you, he 
 will have his own establishment. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan, in the elation of it, had 
 begun to revive ; but there was nevertheless 
 between them rather a conscious pause a 
 pause in which neither visitor nor hostess 
 brought out a hope or an invitation. It 
 expressed in the last resort that, in spite of 
 submission and sympathy, they could now, 
 after all, only look at each other across the 
 social gulf. They remained together as if 
 it would be indeed their last chance, still 
 sitting, though awkwardly, quite close, and 
 feeling also and this most unmistakably 
 that there was one thing more to go into. 
 By the time it came to the surface, more-
 
 IN THE CAGE 219 
 
 over, our young friend had recognized the 
 whole of the main truth, from which she 
 even drew again a slight irritation. It was 
 not the main truth perhaps that most signi 
 fied; but after her momentary effort, her 
 embarrassment and her tears, Mrs. Jordan 
 had begun to sound afresh and even 
 without speaking the note of a social con 
 nection. She hadn t really let go of it that 
 she was marrying into society. Well, it was 
 a harmless compensation, and it was all that 
 the prospective bride of Mr. Mudge had to 
 leave with her.
 
 XXVII 
 
 This young lady at last rose again, but 
 she lingered before going. And has Captain 
 Everard nothing to say to it? 
 
 To what, dear? 
 
 Why, to such questions the domestic 
 arrangements, things in the house. 
 
 How can he, with any authority, when 
 nothing in the house is his? 
 
 Not his? The girl wondered, perfectly 
 conscious of the appearance she thus con 
 ferred on Mrs. Jordan of knowing, in 
 comparison with herself, so tremendously 
 much about it. Well, there were things she 
 wanted so to get at that she was willing at 
 last, though it hurt her, to pay for them 
 with humiliation. Why are they not his? 
 
 Don t you know, dear, that he has 
 nothing? 
 
 Nothing? It was hard to see him in such 
 a light, but Mrs. Jordan s power to answer
 
 222 IN THE CAGE 
 
 for it had a superiority that began, on the 
 spot, to grow. Isn t he rich? 
 
 Mrs. Jordan looked immensely, looked 
 both generally and particularly, informed. 
 
 4 It depends upon what you call ! Not, 
 
 at any rate, in the least as she is. What 
 does he bring? Think what she has. And 
 then, my love, his debts. 
 
 His debts? His young friend was fairly 
 betrayed into helpless innocence. She could 
 struggle a little, but she had to let herself 
 go ; and if she had spoken frankly she would 
 have said: Do tell me, for I don t know 
 so much about him as that! As she didn t 
 speak frankly she only said: His debts are 
 nothing when she so adores him. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan began to fix her again, and 
 now she saw that she could only take it all. 
 That was what it had come to ; his having 
 sat with her there, on the bench and under 
 the trees, in the summer darkness and put 
 his hand on her, making her know what he 
 would have said if permitted; his having 
 returned to her afterwards, repeatedly, with
 
 IN THE CAGE 223 
 
 supplicating eyes and a fever in his blood ; and 
 her having, on her side, hard and pedantic, 
 helped by some miracle and with her impos 
 sible condition, only answered him, yet 
 supplicating back, through the bars of the 
 cage all simply that she might hear of him, 
 now forever lost, only through Mrs. Jordan, 
 who touched him through Mr. Drake, who 
 reached him through Lady Bradeen. She 
 adores him but of course that wasn t all 
 there was about it. 
 
 The girl met her eyes a minute, then 
 quite surrendered. What was there else 
 about it? 
 
 Why, don t you know? Mrs. Jordan was 
 almost compassionate. 
 
 Her interlocutress had, in the cage, 
 sounded depths, but there was a suggestion 
 here somehow of an abyss quite measureless. 
 Of course I know that she would never let 
 him alone. 
 
 How could she fancy ! when he had so 
 compromised her? 
 
 The most artless cry they had ever uttered
 
 224 1N THE CAGE 
 
 broke, at this, from the younger pair of lips. 
 Had he so ? 
 
 Why, don t you know the scandal? 
 
 Our heroine thought, recollected; there 
 was something, whatever it was, that she 
 knew, after all, much more of than Mrs. 
 Jordan. She saw him again as she had seen 
 him come that morning to recover the tele 
 gram she saw him as she had seen him leave 
 the shop. She perched herself a moment 
 on this. Oh, there was nothing public. 
 
 Not exactly public no. But there was 
 an awful scare and an awful row. It was all 
 on the very point of coming out. Some 
 thing was lost something was found. 
 
 Ah, yes, the girl replied, smiling as if 
 with the revival of a blurred memory; 
 something was found. 
 
 It all got about and there was a point 
 at which Lord Bradeen had to act. 
 
 Had to yes. But he didn t. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan was obliged to admit it. 
 No, he didn t. And then, luckily for them, 
 he died.
 
 IN THE CAGE 225 
 
 I didn t know about his death, her com 
 panion said. 
 
 It was nine weeks ago, and most sudden. 
 It has given them a prompt chance. 
 
 To get married this was a wonder 
 within nine weeks? 
 
 Oh, not immediately, but in all the cir 
 cumstances very quietly and, I assure you, 
 very soon. Every preparation s made. 
 Above all, she holds him. 
 
 Oh yes, she holds him! our young friend 
 threw off. She had this before her again a 
 minute; then she continued: You mean 
 through his having made her talked about? 
 
 Yes, but not only that. She has still 
 another pull. 
 
 Another? 
 
 Mrs. Jordan hesitated. Why, he was 
 in something. 
 
 Her comrade wondered. In what? 
 
 I don t know. Something bad. As I 
 tell you, something was found. 
 
 The girl stared. Well 5 
 
 It would have been very bad for him.
 
 226 IN THE CAGE 
 
 But she helped him some way she recov 
 ered it, got hold of it. It s even said she 
 stole it! 
 
 Our young woman considered afresh. 
 Why, it was what was found that precisely 
 saved him. 
 
 Mrs. Jordan, however, was positive. I 
 beg your pardon. I happen to know. 
 
 Her disciple faltered but an instant. Do 
 you mean through Mr. Drake? Do they 
 tell him these things? 
 
 A good servant, said Mrs. Jordan, now 
 thoroughly superior and proportionately 
 sententious, doesn t need to be told! Her 
 ladyship saved as a woman so often saves ! 
 the man she loves. 
 
 This time our heroine took longer to 
 recover herself, but she found a voice at 
 last. Ah, well of course I don t know! 
 The great thing was that he got off. They 
 seem, then, in a manner, she added, to 
 have done a great deal for each other. 
 
 Well, it s she that has done most. She 
 has him tight.
 
 IN THE CAGE 227 
 
 I see, I see. Good-bye. The women 
 had already embraced, and this was not 
 repeated ; but Mrs. Jordan went down with 
 her guest to the door of the house. Here 
 again the younger lingered, reverting, 
 though three or four other remarks had 
 on the way passed between them, to Captain 
 Everard and Lady Bradeen. Did you 
 mean just now that if she hadn t saved him, 
 as you call it, she wouldn t hold him so 
 tight? 
 
 Well, I daresay. Mrs. Jordan, on the 
 doorstep, smiled with a reflection that had 
 come to her ; she took one of her big bites 
 of the brown gloom. Men always dislike 
 one when they have done one an injury. 
 
 But what injury had he done her? 
 
 The one I ve mentioned. He must marry 
 her, you know. 
 
 And didn t he want to? 
 
 Not before. 
 
 Not before she recovered the telegram? 
 
 Mrs. Jordan was pulled up a little. Was 
 it a telegram?
 
 228 IN THE CAGE 
 
 The girl hesitated. I thought you said 
 so. I mean whatever it was. 
 
 Yes, whatever it was, I don t think she 
 saw that. 
 
 So she just nailed him? 
 
 She just nailed him. The departing 
 friend was now at the bottom of the little 
 flight of steps; the other was at the top, 
 with a certain thickness of fog. And when 
 am I to think of you in your little home? 
 next month? asked the voice from the 
 top. 
 
 At the very latest. And when am I to 
 think of you in yours? 
 
 Oh, even sooner. I feel, after so much 
 talk with you about it, as if I were already 
 there! Then Good-\>ye ! came out of 
 the fog. 
 
 Good-<5^/ went into it. Our young lady 
 went into it also, in the opposed quarter, 
 and presently, after a few sightless turns, 
 came out on the Paddington canal. Distin 
 guishing vaguely what the low parapet 
 enclosed, she stopped close to it and stood
 
 IN THE CAGE 229 
 
 a while, very intently, but perhaps still 
 sightlessly, looking down on it. A police 
 man, while she remained, strolled past her; 
 then, going his way a little further and half 
 lost in the atmosphere, paused and watched 
 her. But she was quite unaware she was 
 full of her thoughts. They were too numer 
 ous to find a place just here, but two of the 
 number may at least be mentioned. One of 
 these was that, decidedly, her little home 
 must be not for next month, but for next 
 week ; the other, which came indeed as she 
 resumed her walk and went her way, was 
 that it was strange such a matter should be 
 at last settled for her by Mr. Drake.
 
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