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.
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