This indeed is a small specimen of her cultivation of insidious ways of making things easy for him--ways to which of course she couldn't be at all sure 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 counter-clerk.The most she could hope for apart from the question,which constantly flickered 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,attractive;easier,smoother,sociably brighter,slightly more picturesque,in short more propitious in general to his little affairs,than any other establishment just thereabouts.She was quite aware that they couldn't be,in so huddled a hole,particularly quick;but she found her account in the slowness--she certainly could bear it if HE could.The great pang was that just thereabouts post-offices were so awfully thick.She was always seeing him in imagination in other places and with other girls.But she would defy any other girl to follow him as she followed.And though they weren't,for so many reasons,quick at Cocker's,she could hurry for him when,through an intimation light as air,she gathered that he was pressed.
When hurry was,better still,impossible,it was because of the pleasantest thing of all,the particular element of their contact--she would have called it their friendship--that consisted of an almost humorous treatment of the look of some of his words.They would never perhaps have grown half so intimate if he had not,by the blessing of heaven,formed some of his letters with a queerness--!It was positive that the queerness could scarce have been greater if he had practised it for the very purpose of bringing their heads together over it as far as was possible to heads on different sides of a wire fence.It had taken her truly but once or twice to master these tricks,but,at the cost of striking him perhaps as stupid,she could still challenge them when circumstances favoured.The great circumstance that favoured was that she sometimes actually believed he knew she only feigned perplexity.If he knew it therefore he tolerated it;if he tolerated it he came back;and if he came back he liked her.This was her seventh heaven;and she didn't ask much of his liking--she only asked of it to reach the point of his not going away because of her own.He had at times to be away for weeks;he had to lead lets life;he had to travel--there were places to 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 precisely 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 deprived her even had he been minded,by reason of the web of revelation that was 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 anything so gross as money,and the matter accordingly remained rather vague,all the more that SHE was not a bad girl.
It wasn't 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 on the fact that Cissy and he were so often in different places.She knew by this time all the places--Suchbury,Monkhouse,Whiteroy,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.
