How did our obscure little public servant know that for the lady of the telegrams this was a bad moment?  How did she guess all sorts of impossible things, such as, almost on the very spot, the presence of drama at a critical stage and the nature of the tie with the gentleman at the Hotel Brighton?  More than ever before it floated to her through the bars of the cage that this at last was the high reality, the bristling truth that she had hitherto only patched up and eked out—­one of the creatures, in fine, in whom all the conditions for happiness actually met, and who, in the air they made, bloomed with an unwitting insolence.  What came home to the girl was the way the insolence was tempered by something that was equally a part of the distinguished life, the custom of a flowerlike bend to the less fortunate—­a dropped fragrance, a mere quick breath, but which in fact pervaded and lingered.  The apparition was very young, but certainly married, and our fatigued friend had a sufficient store of mythological comparison to recognise the port of Juno.  Marguerite might be “awful,” but she knew how to dress a goddess.

Pearls and Spanish lace—­she herself, with assurance, could see them, and the “full length” too, and also red velvet bows, which, disposed on the lace in a particular manner (she could have placed them with the turn of a hand) were of course to adorn the front of a black brocade that would be like a dress in a picture.  However, neither Marguerite nor Lady Agnes nor Haddon nor Fritz nor Gussy was what the wearer of this garment had really come in for.  She had come in for Everard—­and that was doubtless not his true name either.  If our young lady had never taken such jumps before it was simply that she had never before been so affected.  She went all the way.  Mary and Cissy had been round together, in their single superb person, to see him—­he must live round the corner; they had found that, in consequence of something they had come, precisely, to make up for or to have another scene about, he had gone off—­gone off just on purpose to make them feel it; on which they had come together to Cocker’s as to the nearest place; where they had put in the three forms partly in order not to put in the one alone.  The two others in a manner, covered it, muffled it, passed it off.  Oh yes, she went all the way, and this was a specimen of how she often went.  She would know the hand again any time.  It was as handsome and as everything else as the woman herself.  The woman herself had, on learning his flight, pushed past Everard’s servant and into his room; she had written her missive at his table and with his pen.  All this, every inch of it, came in the waft that she blew through and left behind her, the influence that, as I have said, lingered.  And among the things the girl was sure of, happily, was that she should see her again.

CHAPTER IV