parted; 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.

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