CHAPTER XXIV

If life at Cocker’s, with the dreadful drop of August, had lost something of its savour, she had not been slow to infer that a heavier blight had fallen on the graceful industry of Mrs. Jordan.

With Lord Rye and Lady Ventnor and Mrs. Bubb all out of town, with the blinds down on all the homes of luxury, this ingenious woman might well have found her wonderful taste left quite on her hands.  She bore up, however, in a way that began by exciting much of her young friend’s esteem; they perhaps even more frequently met as the wine of life flowed less free from other sources, and each, in the lack of better diversion, carried on with more mystification for the other an intercourse that consisted not a little in peeping out and drawing back.  Each waited for the other to commit herself, each profusely curtained for the other the limits of low horizons.  Mrs. Jordan was indeed probably the more reckless skirmisher; nothing could exceed her frequent incoherence unless it was indeed her occasional bursts of confidence.  Her account of her private affairs rose and fell like a flame in the wind—­sometimes the bravest bonfire and sometimes a handful of ashes.  This our young woman took to be an effect of the position, at one moment and another, of the famous door of the great world.  She had been struck in one of her ha’penny volumes with the translation of a French proverb according to which such a door, any door, had to be either open or shut; and it seemed part of the precariousness of Mrs. Jordan’s life that hers mostly managed to be neither.  There had been occasions when it appeared to gape wide—­fairly to woo her across its threshold; there had been others, of an order distinctly disconcerting, when it was all but banged in her face.  On the whole, however, she had evidently not lost heart; these still belonged to the class of things in spite of which she looked well.  She intimated that the profits of her trade had swollen so as to float her through any state of the tide, and she had, besides this, a hundred profundities and explanations.

She rose superior, above all, on the happy fact that there were always gentlemen in town and that gentlemen were her greatest admirers; gentlemen from the City in especial—­as to whom she was full of information about the passion and pride excited in such breasts by the elements of her charming commerce.  The City men did in short go in for flowers.  There was a certain type of awfully smart stockbroker—­Lord Rye called them Jews and bounders, but she didn’t care—­whose extravagance, she more than once threw out, had really, if one had any conscience, to be forcibly restrained.  It was not perhaps a pure love of beauty:  it was a matter of vanity and a sign of business; they wished to crush their rivals, and that was one of their weapons.  Mrs. Jordan’s shrewdness was extreme; she knew in any case her customer—­she dealt, as she