Page:In The Cage (London, Duckworth, 1898).djvu/166

160 it seemed a part of the precariousness of Mrs. Jordan's life that hers mostly managed to be neither. There had been occasions when it appeared to gape wide—fairly to woo her across its threshold; there had been others, of an order distinctly disconcerting, when it was all but banged in her face. On the whole, however, she had evidently not lost heart; these still belonged to the class of things in spite of which she looked well. She intimated that the profits of her trade had swollen so as to float her through any state of the tide, and she had, besides this, a hundred profundities and explanations.

She rose superior, above all, on the happy fact that there were always gentlemen in town and that gentlemen were her greatest admirers; gentlemen from the City in especial as to whom she was full of information about the passion and pride excited in such breasts by the objects of her charming commerce. The City men did, in short, go in for flowers. There was a certain type of awfully smart stockbroker—Lord Rye called them Jews and 'bounders,' but she didn't care—whose extravagance, she more