Page:In The Cage (London, Duckworth, 1898).djvu/61

for the time and without the faintest flash of irony or ripple of laughter, into the whimsical grounds of her enjoyment of Cocker's custom, and instantly to be casting up whatever it might, as Mrs. Jordan had said, lead to. What he had in mind was not, of course, what Mrs. Jordan had had: it was obviously not a source of speculation with him that his sweetheart might pick up a husband. She could see perfectly that this was not, for a moment, even what he supposed she herself dreamed of. What she had done was simply to give his fancy another push into the dim vast of trade. In that direction it was all alert, and she had whisked before it the mild fragrance of a 'connection.' That was the most he could see in any picture of her keeping in with the gentry; and when, getting to the bottom of this, she quickly proceeded to show him the kind of eye she turned on such people and to give him a sketch of what that eye discovered, she reduced him to the particular confusion in which he could still be amusing to her.