This our young woman took to be an effect of the position, at one moment and another, of the famous door of the great world.

She had been struck in one of her ha'penny volumes with the translation of a French proverb according to which such a door, any door, had to be either open or shut; and it seemed part of the precariousness of Mrs.Jordan's life that hers mostly managed to be neither.

There had been occasions when it appeared to gape wide--fairly to woo her across its threshold; there had been others, of an order distinctly disconcerting, when it was all but banged in her face.

On the whole, however, she had evidently not lost heart; these still belonged to the class of things in spite of which she looked well.
She intimated that the profits of her trade had swollen so as to float her through any state of the tide, and she had, besides this, a hundred profundities and explanations.
She rose superior, above all, on the happy fact that there were always gentlemen in town and that gentlemen were her greatest admirers; gentlemen from the City in especial--as to whom she was full of information about the passion and pride excited in such breasts by the elements of her charming commerce.

The City men did in short go in for flowers.