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 9th.  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.  Perhaps it was both, for she had seen stranger 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 winking, sent off five over five different signatures.  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 devilish and successful subterfuges for keeping her at the sounder whenever it looked as if anything might arouse; the sounder, which it was equally his business to mind, being the innermost cell of captivity, a cage within the cage, fenced oft 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 unpleasant 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 splendour 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 consideration 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 even had she wished.