d at moments all the vision of what
poor _she_ might have made of happiness. Blurred and blank as the whole
thing often inevitably, or mercifully, became, she could still, through
crevices and crannies, be stupefied, especially by what, in spite of all
seasoning, touched the sorest place in her consciousness, the revelation
of the golden shower flying about without a gleam of gold for herself. It
remained prodigious to the end, the money her fine friends were able to
spend to get still more, or even to complain to fine friends of their own
that they were in want. The pleasures they proposed were equalled only
by those they declined, and they made their appointments often so
expensively that she was left wondering at the nature of the delights to
which the mere approaches were so paved with shillings. She quivered on
occasion into the perception of this and that one whom she would on the
chance have just simply liked to _be_. Her conceit, her baffled vanity,
was possibly monstrous; she certainly often threw herself into a defiant
conviction that she would have done the whole thing much better. But her
greatest comfort, mostly, was her comparative vision of the men; by whom
I mean the unmistakeable gentlemen, for she had no interest in the
spurious or the shabby and no mercy at all for the poor. She could have
found a sixpence, outside, for an appearance of want; but her fancy, in
some directions so alert, had never a throb of response for any sign of
the sordid. The men she did track, moreover, she tracked mainly in one
relation, the relation as to which the cage convinced her, she believed,
more than anything else could have done, that it was quite the most
diffused.

She found her ladies, in short, almost always in communication with her
gentlemen, and her gentlemen with her ladies, and she read into the
immensity of their intercourse stories and meanings without end.
Incontestably she grew to think that the men cut the best figure; and in
this particular, as in many others, she arrived at a philosophy of her
own, all made up of her private notations and cynicisms. It was a
striking part of the business, for example, that it was much more the
women, on the whole, who were after the men than the men who were after
the women: it was literally visible that the general attitude of the one
sex was that of the object pursued and defensive, apologetic and
attenuating, while the light of her own nature helped her more