Page:In The Cage (London, Duckworth, 1898).djvu/43

Rh the subject of the way that, in the practice of her beautiful art, 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