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 making 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 flattered herself,than any of which she could be made the subject;and though most people were too stupid to be conscious of this it brought her endless small 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,her vision for silver threads and moonbeams and her gift for keeping the clues and finding 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 stupefied,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 prodigious 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 proposed were equalled only by those they declined,and they made their appointments often so expensively that she was left wondering 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 would on the chance have just simply liked to BE.Her conceit,her baffled vanity,was 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,mostly,was her comparative vision of the men;by whom I mean the unmistakeable gentlemen,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,outside,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 track,moreover,she tracked mainly in one relation,the relation as to which the cage convinced her,she believed,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 gentlemen,and her gentlemen with her ladies,and she read into the immensity of their intercourse stories and meanings without end.Incontestably she grew to think that the men cut the best figure;and in this particular,as in many others,she arrived at a philosophy 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,apologetic and attenuating,while the light of her own nature helped her more or less to conclude as to the attitude of the other.Perhaps 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 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 suggestion,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 happened 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 common,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.
