Генри Джеймс - In the Cage стр 6.

Mrs. Jordan was at present fairly dazzling on the subject of the way that, in the practice of her fairy art, as she called it, she more than peeped inshe penetrated.  There was not a house of the great kindand it was of course only a question of those, real homes of luxuryin which she was not, at the rate such people now had things, all over the place.  The girl felt before the picture the cold breath of disinheritance as much as she had ever felt it in the cage; she knew moreover how much she betrayed this, for the experience of poverty had begun, in her life, too early, and her ignorance of the requirements of homes of luxury had grown, with other active knowledge, a depth of simplification.  She had accordingly at first often found that in these colloquies she could only pretend she understood.  Educated as she had rapidly been by her chances at Cockers, there were still strange gaps in her learningshe could never, like Mrs. Jordan, have found her way about one of the homes.  Little by little, however, she had caught on, above all in the light of what Mrs. Jordans redemption had materially made of that lady, giving her, though the years and the struggles had naturally not straightened a feature, an almost super-eminent air.  There were women in and out of Cockers who were quite nice and who yet didnt look well; whereas Mrs. Jordan looked well and yet, with her extraordinarily protrusive teeth, was by no means quite nice.  It would seem, mystifyingly, that it might really come from all the greatness she could live with.  It was fine to hear her talk so often of dinners of twenty and of her doing, as she said, exactly as she liked with them.  She spoke as if, for that matter, she invited the company.  They simply give me the tableall the rest, all the other effects, come afterwards.

CHAPTER VII

Then you do see them? the girl again asked.

Mrs. Jordan hesitated, and indeed the point had been ambiguous before.  Do you mean the guests?

Her young friend, cautious about an undue exposure of innocence, was not quite sure.  Wellthe people who live there.

Lady Ventnor?  Mrs. Bubb?  Lord Rye?  Dear, yes.  Why they like one.

But does one personally know them? our young lady went on, since that was the way to speak.  I mean socially, dont you know?as you know me.

Theyre not so nice as you! Mrs. Jordan charmingly cried.  But I shall see more and more of them.

Ah this was the old story.  But how soon?

Why almost any day.  Of course, Mrs. Jordan honestly added, theyre nearly always out.

Then why do they want flowers all over?

Oh that doesnt make any difference.  Mrs. Jordan was not philosophic; she was just evidently determined it shouldnt make any.  Theyre awfully interested in my ideas, and its inevitable they should meet me over them.

Her interlocutress was sturdy enough.  What do you call your ideas?

Mrs. Jordans reply was fine.  If you were to see me some day with a thousand tulips youd discover.

A thousand?the girl gaped at such a revelation of the scale of it; she felt for the instant fairly planted out.  Well, but if in fact they never do meet you? she none the less pessimistically insisted.

Never?  They often doand evidently quite on purpose.  We have grand long talks.

There was something in our young lady that could still stay her from asking for a personal description of these apparitions; that showed too starved a state.  But while she considered she took in afresh the whole of the clergymans widow.  Mrs. Jordan couldnt help her teeth, and her sleeves were a distinct rise in the world.  A thousand tulips at a shilling clearly took one further than a thousand words at a penny; and the betrothed of Mr. Mudge, in whom the sense of the race for life was always acute, found herself wondering, with a twinge of her easy jealousy, if it mightnt after all then, for her also, be betterbetter than where she wasto follow some such scent.  Where she was was where Mr. Bucktons elbow could freely enter her right side and the counter-clerks breathinghe had something the matter with his nosepervade her left ear.  It was something to fill an office under Government, and she knew but too well there were places commoner still than Cockers; but it needed no great range of taste to bring home to her the picture of servitude and promiscuity she couldnt but offer to the eye of comparative freedom.  She was so boxed up with her young men, and anything like a margin so absent, that it needed more art than she should ever possess to pretend in the least to compass, with any one in the nature of an acquaintancesay with Mrs. Jordan herself, flying in, as it might happen, to wire sympathetically to Mrs. Bubban approach to a relation of elegant privacy.  She remembered the day when Mrs. Jordan had, in fact, by the greatest chance, come in with fifty-three words for Lord Rye and a five-pound note to change.  This had been the dramatic manner of their reuniontheir mutual recognition was so great an event.  The girl could at first only see her from the waist up, besides making but little of her long telegram to his lordship.  It was a strange whirligig that had converted the clergymans widow into such a specimen of the class that went beyond the sixpence.

Nothing of the occasion, all the more, had ever become dim; least of all the way that, as her recovered friend looked up from counting, Mrs. Jordan had just blown, in explanation, through her teeth and through the bars of the cage: I do flowers, you know.  Our young woman had always, with her little finger crooked out, a pretty movement for counting; and she had not forgotten the small secret advantage, a sharpness of triumph it might even have been called, that fell upon her at this moment and avenged her for the incoherence of the message, an unintelligible enumeration of numbers, colours, days, hours.  The correspondence of people she didnt know was one thing; but the correspondence of people she did had an aspect of its own for her even when she couldnt understand it.  The speech in which Mrs. Jordan had defined a position and announced a profession was like a tinkle of bluebells; but for herself her one idea about flowers was that people had them at funerals, and her present sole gleam of light was that lords probably had them most.  When she watched, a minute later, through the cage, the swing of her visitors departing petticoats, she saw the sight from the waist down; and when the counter-clerk, after a mere male glance, remarked, with an intention unmistakeably low, Handsome woman! she had for him the finest of her chills: Shes the widow of a bishop.  She always felt, with the counter-clerk, that it was impossible sufficiently to put it on; for what she wished to express to him was the maximum of her contempt, and that element in her nature was confusedly stored.  A bishop was putting it on, but the counter-clerks approaches were vile.  The night, after this, when, in the fulness of time, Mrs. Jordan mentioned the grand long talks, the girl at last brought out: Should I see them?I mean if I were to give up everything for you.

Mrs. Jordan at this became most arch.  Id send you to all the bachelors!

Our young lady could be reminded by such a remark that she usually struck her friend as pretty.  Do they have their flowers?