y 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 _you_ could give it--because you
_are_ one. Then we _should_ win. Therefore just come in with me."

"And leave the P.O.?"

"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
de