Once she said: “I hope, Millie dear, I’m not keeping you from anything. We shall be home by half-past four.”
In exchange for these two little remarks Millie talked a great deal, and the more she talked the more awkward she seemed. She was very unhappy about her mother, and she wished that she could comfort her, but she knew her so little and had been always on such careless terms with her that now she had no intuition about her.
“What is she thinking?... I know Katherine has hurt her terribly. She oughtn’t to wear a hat like that: it doesn’t suit her a bit. Why isn’t it I who have forgotten, and Katie here instead to console her? Only then she wouldn’t want consolation....”
As they walked up the steps of the Stores they were stared at by a number of little dogs on chains, who all seemed to assert their triumphant claims on somebody’s especial affections. The little dogs stirred Mrs. Trenchard’s unhappiness, without her knowing why. All down Victoria Street she had been thinking to herself: “Katherine never forgot before—never. It was only this morning—if it had even been yesterday—but this morning! Millie doesn’t understand, and she didn’t want to come—Katie....”
She walked slowly into the building, and was at once received by that friendly, confused smell of hams and medicines which is the Stores’ note of welcome. Lights shone, warmth eddied in little gusts of hot air from corner to corner: there was much conversation, but all of a very decent kind: ladies, not very grand ones and not very poor ones, but comfortable, motherly, housekeeping ladies were everywhere to be seen.
No wonder, surely, that Mrs. Trenchard loved the Stores! Here was everything gathered in from the ends of the earth that was solid and sound and real. Here were no extravagances, no decadencies, no flowing creations with fair outsides and no heart to them, nothing foreign nor degenerate. However foreign an article might be before it entered the Stores, once inside those walls it adopted itself at once to the claims of a Cathedral City—even the Eastern carpets, stained though their past lives might be with memories of the Harem, recognised that their future lay along the floor of a Bishop’s study, a Major’s drawing-room or the dining-room of a country rectory. If ever Mrs. Trenchard was alarmed by memories of foreign influences, of German invasions, or Armenian atrocities, she had only to come to the Stores to be entirely reassured. It would be better for our unbalanced and hysterical alarmists did they visit the Stores more frequently....
But frequent visits had bred in Mrs. Trenchard a yet warmer intimacy. Although she had never put her feeling into words, she was determined now that the Stores was maintained solely in the Trenchard and Faunder interests. So pleasant and personally submissive had the young men and young women of the place been to her all these years, that she now regarded them with very nearly the personal benevolence that she bestowed upon her own Rebekah, Rocket, Jacob and so on. She felt that only Trenchards and Faunders could have produced an organisation whose spirit was so entirely sprung from their own views and observances. She did not defend or extol those views. There simply they were! and out of them the Stores were born. She paid her call here, therefore, rather as a Patroness visits a Hospital in which she is interested—with no conceit or false pride, but with a maternal anxiety that everything should be well and prosperous. Everything always was well and prosperous.... She was a happy Patroness!
“That’s a splendid ham!” were invariably her first words, and “I do like the way they arrange things here,” her second. She could have wandered, very happily, all day from compartment to compartment, stopping continually to observe, to touch, to smile, to blow her nose (being moved, very often, quite emotionally) to beam happily upon the customers and then to turn, with a little smile of intimacy, to the young men in frock coats and shiny hair, as though she would say: “We’ve got a good crowd to-day. Everyone seems comfortable ... but how can they help it when everything is so beautifully done?”
Her chief pride and happiness found its ultimate crown in the furniture department. Here, hung as it was somewhere up aloft, with dark bewildering passages starting into infinity on every side of it, was the place that her soul truly loved. She could gaze all day upon those sofas and chairs. Those wonderful leather couches of dark red and dark blue, so solid, so stern in their unrelenting opposition to flighty half-and-half, so self-supporting and self-satisfying, so assured of propriety and comfort and solid value for your money. She would sink slowly into a huge leather arm-chair, and from her throne smile upon the kind gentleman who washed his hands in front of her.
“And how much is this one?”