And though they weren't, for so many reasons, quick at Cocker's, she could hurry for him when, through an intimation light as air, she gathered that he was pressed.
When hurry was, better still, impossible, it was because of the pleasantest thing of all, the particular element of their contact--she would have called it their friendship--that consisted of an almost humorous treatment of the look of some of his words.

They would never perhaps have grown half so intimate if he had not, by the blessing of heaven, formed some of his letters with a queerness--! It was positive that the queerness could scarce have been greater if he had practised it for the very purpose of bringing their heads together over it as far as was possible to heads on different sides of a wire fence.

It had taken her truly but once or twice to master these tricks, but, at the cost of striking him perhaps as stupid, she could still challenge them when circumstances favoured.

The great circumstance that favoured was that she sometimes actually believed he knew she only feigned perplexity.

If he knew it therefore he tolerated it; if he tolerated it he came back; and if he came back he liked her.