The man, seeing that it is to be a long business, gives up the problem for the moment, and moves in despair to the next customer.
Now it is the turn of a little old lady, with a deprecating manner: "I want something nice, and not too clever," she murmured: "something I can knit over, you know, after breakfast. No, not religious, I somehow find that's too depressing. How would this do?" as she picked up a volume that was flaunting itself on the counter, "Sir Richard Calmady. I think I'd like that, if it's at all like Sir George Tressady."
"No, madam, not at all the sort of thing for you," the young man hastened to say with an air of authority. "Allow me: Try this; this is a very safe book, Miss Edna Lyall's latest, In Spite of All. This (confidentially) is an author we always recommend."
Now there bustled up a young-old lady with fuzzy hair and a sailor hat: "I want all the most go-ahead novels you have," she cried: "somethin' really startling, somethin' that'll keep you awake and excited all through."
This lady being fortunately in a hurry, was quickly got rid of with a judicious mixture of Hall Caine, Guy Boothby, and Marie Corelli, in equal quantities.
Finally there came a nondescript, pudding-faced young woman, who said, vaguely, as if fulfilling a painful duty: "I want a novel. What is being read now?" She, however, proved very amenable, and went off dutifully with Elizabeth's Visits, The Love-letters of Anonyma, and the Transvaal War.
What vast knowledge of human nature must, one thinks, these young men at the libraries possess! They seem to enact the part of general literary adviser to the enormous feminine public. They know their types well, too: they rarely mistake. They may almost be said to form the minds of their customers; and they may, they possibly do, rule over a large proportion of human opinion.
Ladies, as I said, seldom buy new books; they seem to prefer reading novels that others have well thumbed. New book-shops, therefore, are few and far between; they mostly congregate about St. Paul's, and in the neighbourhood of what used to be Holywell Street; for trades in London, as is well known, tend to have their own special districts. In the poorer quarters, however, and in the near suburbs, everything is, on the contrary, placed in the queerest juxtaposition; thus, you may see a house labelled "Embalming done here," between two others respectively inscribed: "Hot Dinners served here," and "Cheap Mangling done;" while the big shopping palaces in Westbourne Grove and elsewhere advertise themselves, modestly, to provide everything, from a coffin to a hired guest. Some of our shops and ways must indeed puzzle the unsophisticated foreigner. Mr. Samuel Butler has told an amusing story of how a poor Ticinese peasant woman was one day found on her knees in prayer before an elaborate dentist's "show case" in Soho,—imagining it, doubtless, to contain the relics of a saint!
Shops, in some of the poor districts, afford remarkable insight into cockney character. There is, for instance, the old plant-hawker who sells you rotten roots with a sweet smile: there is the no less charming bird-fancier who gets rid of a songless hen-canary at the modest price of 10/-, assuring you, meanwhile, that "no better singer ever lived"; there is the lady-greengrocer who lets you have plums at a penny a pound dearer than the market-price—"though it's a robbin' me and my poor innercent childern, that's what it is!"
It is not, however, always the shopman whose ways are most open to criticism. For, not only in the poorer districts, customers exist whose ideas of integrity are not of the finest. In Somers, Camden, or Kentish Towns, where the trader must, of necessity and from custom, spread out his goods in the street, to catch the eye, on projecting booths, that articles should occasionally be missed is, perhaps, hardly wonderful; and yet, curiously enough, it is rather in the big West End emporiums that shop-lifting is most common. Sales especially are most dangerous in this respect. Managers, notably of big drapery emporiums, say that they expect to lose a certain percentage regularly in this way: it is regarded as part of the business.