Henry James

In the Cage Henry James

It had occurred to her early that in her position-that of a young person spending, in framed andwired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie-she should know a great many personswithout their recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively-thoughsingularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much smothered-to see any onecome in whom she knew outside, as she called it, any one who could add anything to the meannessof her function. Her function was to sit there with two young men-the other telegraphist and thecounter-clerk; to mind the "sounder," which was always going, to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, more than anything else, countwords as numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of the telegrams thrust, from morning tonight, through the gap left in the high lattice, across the encumbered shelf that her forearm achedwith rubbing. This transparent screen fenced out or fenced in, according to the side of the narrowcounter on which the human lot was cast, the duskiest corner of a shop pervaded not a little, inwinter, by the poison of perpetual gas, and at all times by the presence of hams, cheese, dried fish, soap, varnish, paraffin and other solids and fluids that she came to know perfectly by their smellswithout consenting to know them by their names. The barrier that divided the little post-and-telegraph-office from the grocery was a frail structure ofwood and wire; but the social, the professional separation was a gulf that fortune, by a stroke quiteremarkable, had spared her the necessity of contributing at all publicly to bridge. When Mr. Cocker's young men stepped over from behind the other counter to change a five-pound note-andMr. Cocker's situation, with the cream of the "Court Guide" and the dearest furnished apartments, Simpkin's, Ladle's, Thrupp's, just round the corner, was so select that his place was quite pervadedby the crisp rustle of these emblems-she pushed out the sovereigns as if the applicant were nomore to her than one of the momentary, the practically featureless, appearances in the greatprocession; and this perhaps all the more from the very fact of the connexion (only recognisedoutside indeed) to which she had lent herself with ridiculous inconsequence. She recognised theothers the less because she had at last so unreservedly, so irredeemably, recognised Mr. Mudge. However that might be, she was a little ashamed of having to admit to herself that Mr. Mudge's removal to a higher sphere-to a more commanding position, that is, though to a muchlower neighbourhood-would have been described still better as a luxury than as the meresimplification, the corrected awkwardness, that she contented herself with calling it. He had at anyrate ceased to be all day long in her eyes, and this left something a little fresh for them to rest on of aSund