Accordingly, favouring him with a bewitching smile, that a better man than he might have been proud to win, she scarcely touched the hand he held out to assist her (which he carefully dry-washed afterwards, as though the contact even of her fairy fingers had dissolved the spell of its prudish purity), and sprang lightly into the “phee-aton.”
Half an hour’s drive brought them to Flatville, where Mr. Selby, so to speak, washed his hands of them, and went on to the railroad station. Then began the shopping, that most mysterious and deeply-seated passion of the female heart—the one master vice which serves the ladies of England, instead of the turf, the wine-cup, and the gaming table, which mislead their lords. There can be little doubt who first invented shopping! The same hand which launched that arrow into the bosom of private life, gave to the child-woman, Eve, the apple that betrayed her—an apple which contained the seeds of shopping. It is such a seductive, hypocritical sin, too, this same shopping—one which is so easily dressed up to resemble a virtue—that it is almost impossible to distinguish its true character till the bill comes in: that, like the touch of Ithuriel’s spear, reveals the fiend in all its deformity. Every woman (that we have known) is more or less addicted to this ruinous practice, but some appear especially gifted with the fatal talent, and, if the truth must be told, our little heroine was one of these unfortunates. The amount of shopping she would contrive to get, even out of a piece of tape, was fearful to reflect upon. In the first place, it was to be of a particular (very particular) texture, neither too coarse nor too fine; then society would probably be uprooted, and the Thames be set on fire, if it were a shade too wide, or, worse still, too narrow. Again, tape was useless without needles and thread, wherewith to operate upon it; and for some time—indeed, till the obsequious parrot of a shopman had gone through his whole vocabulary of persuasion, and become cynical and monosyllabic—all the needles were too large; and, that difficulty being overcome, the thread (sewing cotton Emily called it) took a perverse turn, and would by no means sympathise with the eyes of the selected needles, till the harassed shopman muttered a private aspiration in regard to those useful orifices, which would have cost him five shillings in any court of justice. But he took his revenge, did that cunning shopman, for, no sooner had Emily bought all that she required, than he suddenly recovered his good humour and loquacity, and placed before her exactly the very articles she most desired, and had not funds to purchase withal, till Tantalus himself might have appeared a gentleman who lived at home at ease, in comparison with that sorely-tempted “Rose-bud.”
Still, what woman could do, she did, for she firmly resisted everything, till an unlucky remnant of magpie-coloured ribbon, the “very thing she should want when she changed her mourning, and which she knew she could never meet with again,” a ribbon so cheap that the shopman declared he was “giving it away,” at the very moment when he was adding two shillings to the bill on the strength of it; though this reductive ribbon beguiled her, the little concession only proved that she was not above humanity. With which fact we are well contented, because, enjoying but a very distant and limited acquaintance with such higher circles as she would otherwise have mixed in, we might never have heard of her existence, That she possessed some power of self-denial she proved, by paying her bill and quitting the shop the moment that ribbon had conquered her; the next best thing to resisting temptation being to fly from it.
“Why, Caroline dear, we must have been an age in that shop, it is nearly five o’clock! What can have become of your father’s carriage?” exclaimed Emily, glancing in dismay at the hands of the old church clock, which pointed to a quarter to five.
“Really I can’t conceive,” was the reply: “something must have occurred to delay it, I suppose; it will be growing dusk before we can get home if we have to walk by the road, and we can scarcely attempt the fields so late by ourselves.”
“Mamma will be so frightened,” suggested Emily, “if it gets at all dark before we return—had we not better start at once, and walk on till the carriage overtakes us?”
Caroline agreed to this plan, merely proposing the emendation that they should leave word they had done so, and that the groom, if he ever appeared, was to follow and endeavour to overtake them. For this purpose they re-entered the linen-draper’s shop, where, while they paused for a moment to deliver the message, that vindictive shopman actually was scoundrel enough to display at arm’s length a flimsy black scarf (barege we believe the villain called it), which, down to the very pattern itself (opaque spots of the same material, representing apparently a turnip with a cocked hat on, though we can scarcely bring ourselves to believe the draughtsman could seriously have thus planned the design), Emily had dreamed of only the night before: such is the heartlessness of men—at least of shopmen.
The two girls, having nobly withstood the scarf, started energetically on their homeward walk, nor were their tongues less active than their feet, but then they had so much to talk about. The linen-draper’s stock was first done ample justice to; that “dear” silver grey mousseline de soie, which wasn’t dear at all, but as cheap as—(the ribbon, perhaps, on which the shop-keeper only realised some fifty per cent., but then it was a remnant, and given away)—and then those gloves, French kid, oh! they must have been smuggled; how wrong it was to smuggle, at least papa (Selby) always said so, but really the price was quite ridiculous; didn’t Emily think so?
Emily did not know about its being ridiculous, but it was dreadfully tempting; and if she had not made up her mind irrevocably against changing any one of the three sovereigns she had in her purse, and which must last her for pocket-money for the next two months, she should decidedly have bought a pair, really, for the sake of economy.
This fruitful and edifying topic lasted them a good mile and a half, and was not yet exhausted, when Emily interrupted herself by exclaiming—“Upon my word it’s growing quite dusk; I wonder whether that carriage is ever coming?”