In the Cage

wretches, I assure you —

ou want to sta

cause they are. It ma

I thought yo

just to loathe them. You wouldn’t b

told me? You didn’t menti

s 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 one

me from?” her compani

found something. “From the ‘spring

nough at Chalk Fa

here the money was flying than where it was simply and meagrely nesting. The air felt that stir, he had to acknowledge, much less at Chalk Farm than in the district in which his beloved so oddly enjoyed her footing. She gave him, she could see, a restless sense that these might be familiarities not to be sacrificed; germs, possibilities, faint foreshowings — heaven knew what — of the initiation it would prove profitable to have arrived at when in the fulness of time he should have his own shop in some such paradise. What really touched him — that was discernible — was that she could feed him with so much mere vividness of reminder, keep before him, as by the play of a fan, the v

to work out his thought to the end was: “I see, I see. Lash them up then, lead them on, keep them going: some of it can’t help, some time, coming our way.” Yet he was troubled by the suspicion of subtleties on his companion’s part that spoiled the straight view. He couldn’t understand people’s hating what they liked or liking what they hated; above all it hurt him somewhere — for he had his private delicacies — to see anything but money made out of

a prolonged boldness. “My dea

hed; “but that doesn’

give up my friends. I’m makin

dered. “How muc

ge of course could only strike him at the best as rather fantastic; but it was always to the good to keep hold when you had hold, and such an attitude would also after all involve a high tribute to her fidelity. Of one thing she absolutely never doubted: Mr. Mudge believed in her with a belief —! She believed in herself too, for that matter: if there was a thing in the world no one could charge her with it was being