Mrs. Jordan took this in with complete intelligence.  “Yes, and I dare say it’s some of your people that I do.”

Her companion assented, but discriminated.  “I doubt if you ‘do’ them as much 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 make a clergyman’s widow not imperceptibly gasp; it was in intention moreover something of a retort to the thousand tulips.  “Their vices?  Have they got vices?”

Our young critic even more overtly 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. “I find out everything.”

Mrs. Jordan, at bottom a very meek person, was visibly struck.  “I see.  You do ‘have’ them.”

“Oh I don’t care!  Much good it does 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 suddenly 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.  She didn’t say it, however; 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.  “Ah that’s because you’ve no sympathy!”

The girl gave an ironic laugh, only retorting that nobody could have any who 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 managed:  the strain was over the ineffable simplicities, 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