Little by little, to her own stupefaction, she caught that he was trying to take it as she meant it and that he was neither astonished nor angry. Oh the British tradesman—this gave her an idea of his resources! Mr. Mudge would be angry only with a person who, like the drunken soldier in the shop, should have an unfavourable effect on business. He seemed positively to enter, 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 sensibility 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 “connexion.” That was the most he could see in any account of her keeping in, on whatever roundabout lines, 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 prostration in which he could still be amusing to her. CHAPTER X. “They’re the most awful wretches, I assure you—the lot all about there.” “Then why do you want to stay among them?” “My dear man, just because they _are_. It makes me hate them so.” “Hate them? I thought you liked them.” “Don’t be stupid. What I ‘like’ is just to loathe them. You wouldn’t believe what passes before my eyes.” “Then why have you never told me? You didn’t mention anything before I left.” “Oh I hadn’t got round to it then. It’s the sort of thing you don’t believe at first; you have to look round you a bit and then you understand. You work into it more and more. Besides,” the girl went on, “this is the time of the year when the worst lot come up. They’re simply packed together in those smart streets. Talk of the numbers of the poor! What _I_ can vouch for is the numbers of the rich! There are new ones every day, and they seem to get richer and richer. Oh, they do come up!” she cried, imitating for her private recreation—she was sure it wouldn’t reach Mr. Mudge—the low intonation of the counter-clerk. “And where do they come from?” her companion candidly enquired. She had to think a moment; then she found something. “From the ‘spring meetings.’ They bet tremendously.” “Well, they bet enough at Chalk Farm, if that’s all.”