olution. She would have given almost as much for
just the right chance--it would have to be tremendously right--to show
him in some sharp sweet way that she had perfectly penetrated the
greatest of these last and now lived with it in a kind of heroism of
sympathy. He was in love with a woman to whom, and to any view of whom,
a lady-telegraphist, and especially one who passed a life among hams and
cheeses, was as the sand on the floor; and what her dreams desired was
the possibility of its somehow coming to him that her own interest in him
could take a pure and noble account of such an infatuation and even of
such an impropriety. As yet, however, she could only rub along with the
hope that an accident, sooner or later, might give her a lift toward
popping out with something that would surprise and perhaps even, some
fine day, assist him. What could people mean moreover--cheaply sarcastic
people--by not feeling all that could be got out of the weather? _She_
felt it all, and seemed literally to feel it most when she went quite
wrong, speaking of the stuffy days as cold, of the cold ones as stuffy,
and betraying how little she knew, in her cage, of whether it was foul or
fair. It was for that matter always stuffy at Cocker's, and she finally
settled down to the safe proposition that the outside element was
"changeable." Anything seemed true that made him so radiantly assent.

This indeed is a small specimen of her cultivation of insidious ways of
making things easy for him--ways to which of course she couldn't be at
all sure he did real justice. Real justice was not of this world: she
had had too often to come back to that; yet, strangely, happiness was,
and her traps had to be set for it in a manner to keep them unperceived
by Mr. Buckton and the counter-clerk. The most she could hope for apart
from the question, which constantly flickered up and died down, of the
divine chance of his consciously liking her, would be that, without
analysing it, he should arrive at a vague sense that Cocker's was--well,
attractive; easier, smoother, sociably brighter, slightly more
picturesque, in short more propitious in general to his little affairs,
than any other establishment just thereabouts. She was quite aware that
they couldn't be, in so huddled a hole, particularly quick; but she found
her account in the slowness--she certainly could bear it if _he_ could.
The great pang was that just thereabouts post-offices were so awfu