<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
<p>She met Mrs. Jordan when she could, and learned from her more and
more how the great people, under her gentle shake and after going through
everything with the mere shops, were waking up to the gain of putting
into the hands of a person of real refinement the question that the
shop-people spoke of so vulgarly as that of the floral decorations.
The regular dealers in these decorations were all very well; but there
was a peculiar magic in the play of taste of a lady who had only to
remember, through whatever intervening dusk, all her own little tables,
little bowls and little jars and little other arrangements, and the
wonderful thing she had made of the garden of the vicarage. This
small domain, which her young friend had never seen, bloomed in Mrs.
Jordan’s discourse like a new Eden, and she converted the past
into a bank of violets by the tone in which she said “Of course
you always knew my one passion!” She obviously met now,
at any rate, a big contemporary need, measured what it was rapidly becoming
for people to feel they could trust her without a tremor. It brought
them a peace that—during the quarter of an hour before dinner
in especial—was worth more to them than mere payment could express.
Mere payment, none the less, was tolerably prompt; she engaged by the
month, taking over the whole thing; and there was an evening on which,
in respect to our heroine, she at last returned to the charge.
“It’s growing and growing, and I see that I must really
divide the work. One wants an associate—of one’s own
kind, don’t you know? You know the look they want it all
to have?—of having come, not from a florist, but from one of themselves.
Well, I’m sure <i>you</i> could give it—because you <i>are</i>
one. Then we <i>should</i> win. Therefore just come in with
me.”</p>
<p>“And leave the P.O.?”</p>
<p>“Let the P.O. simply bring you your letters. It would
bring you lots, you’d see: orders, after a bit, by the score.”
It was on this, in due course, that the great advantage again came up:
“One seems to live again with one’s own people.”
It had taken some little time (after their having parted company in
the tempest of their troubles and then, in the glimmering dawn, finally
sighted each other again) for each to admit that the other was, in her
private circle, her only equal, but the admission came, when it did
come, with an honest groan; and since equality was named, each found
much personal profit in exaggerating the other’s original grandeur.
Mrs. Jordan was ten years the older, but her young friend was struck
with the smaller difference this now made: it had counted otherwise
at the time when, much more as a friend of her mother’s, the bereaved
lady, without a penny of provision and with stopgaps, like their own,
all gone, had, across the sordid landing on which the opposite doors
of the pair of scared miseries opened and to which they were bewilderedly
bolted, borrowed coals and umbrellas that were repaid in potatoes and
postage-stamps. It had been a questionable help, at that time,
to ladies submerged, floundering, panting, swimming for their lives,
that they were ladies; but such an advantage could come up again in
proportion as others vanished, and it had grown very great by the time
it was the only ghost of one they possessed. They had literally
watched it take to itself a portion of the substance of each that had
departed; and it became prodigious now, when they could talk of it together,
when they could look back at it across a desert of accepted derogation,
and when, above all, they could together work up a credulity about it
that neither could otherwise work up. Nothing was really so marked
as that they felt the need to cultivate this legend much more after
having found their feet and stayed their stomachs in the ultimate obscure
than they had done in the upper air of mere frequent shocks. The
thing they could now oftenest say to each other was that they knew what
they meant; and the sentiment with which, all round, they knew it was
known had well-nigh amounted to a promise not again to fall apart.</p>
<p>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 in—she penetrated. There was not a house of
the great kind—and it was of course only a question of those,
real homes of luxury—in 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 Cocker’s, there
were still strange gaps in her learning—she 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. Jordan’s 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 Cocker’s who were quite nice and who yet didn’t 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 table—all the rest, all the other effects, come afterwards.”</p>
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