In the Cage

CHAPTER I.

It had occurred to her early that in her position—that of a young personspending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or amagpie—she should know a great many persons without their recognising theacquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively—though singularlyrare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much smothered—tosee any one come in whom she knew outside, as she called it, any one who couldadd anything to the meanness of her function. Her function was to sit therewith two young men—the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk; to mindthe “sounder,” which was always going, to dole out stamps andpostal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult changeand, more than anything else, count words as numberless as the sands of thesea, the words of the telegrams thrust, from morning to night, through the gapleft in the high lattice, across the encumbered shelf that her forearm achedwith rubbing. This transparent screen fenced out or fenced in, according to theside of the narrow counter on which the human lot was cast, the duskiest cornerof a shop pervaded not a little, in winter, by the poison of perpetual gas, andat 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 theirsmells without consenting to know them by their names.

The barrier that divided the little post-and-telegraph-office from the grocerywas a frail structure of wood and wire; but the social, the professionalseparation was a gulf that fortune, by a stroke quite re

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