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 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 treatment of his appearance as would make him resemble even remotely a man of the world.His very beauty was the beauty of a grocer,and the finest future would offer it none too much room consistently to develop.She had engaged herself in short to the perfection of a type,and almost anything square and smooth and whole had its weight for a person still conscious herself of being a mere bruised fragment of wreckage.But it contributed hugely at present to carry on the two parallel lines of her experience in the cage and her experience out of it.After keeping quiet for some time about this opposition she suddenly--one Sunday afternoon on a penny chair in the Regent's Park--broke,for him,capriciously,bewilderingly,into an intimation of what it came to.He had naturally pressed more and more on the point of her again placing herself where he could see her hourly,and for her to recognise that she had as yet given him no sane reason for delay he had small need to describe himself as unable to make out what she was up to.As if,with her absurd bad reasons,she could have begun to tell him!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 sometimes she thought it would be disgusting and perhaps even fatal.She liked him,however,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 arguments.Then at last,simply as if by accident 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 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 astonished nor angry.Oh the British tradesman--this gave her an idea of his resources!Mr.Mudge would be angry only with a person who,like the drunken soldier in the shop,should have an unfavourable effect on business.He seemed positively to enter,for the time and without the faintest flash of irony or ripple of laughter,into the whimsical grounds of her enjoyment of Cocker's custom,and instantly to be casting up whatever it might,as Mrs.
Jordan had said,lead to.What he had in mind was not of course what Mrs.Jordan had had:it was obviously not a source of speculation with him that his sweetheart might pick up a husband.
She could see perfectly that this was not for a moment even what he supposed she herself dreamed of.What she had done was simply to give his sensibility another push into the dim vast of trade.In that direction it was all alert,and she had whisked before it the mild fragrance of a "connexion."That was the most he could see in any account of her keeping in,on whatever roundabout lines,with the gentry;and when,getting to the bottom of this,she quickly proceeded to show him the kind of eye she turned on such people and to give him a sketch of what that eye discovered,she reduced him to the particular prostration in which he could still be amusing to her.
