Генри Джеймс - In the Cage

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 didn’t know was one thing; but the correspondence of people she did had an aspect of its own for her even when she couldn’t 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 visitor’s 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: “She’s 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-clerk’s 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. “I’d 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?”

“Oceans. And they’re the most particular.” Oh it was a wonderful world. “You should see Lord Rye’s.”

“His flowers?”

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