The weak-kneed wastrel, receiving to his astonishment a shilling, departed.
Grindley senior had selected wisely. Mrs. Postwhistle’s theory was that although very few people in this world understood their own business, they understood it better than anyone else could understand it for them. If handsome, well-educated young gentlemen, who gave shillings to wastrels, felt they wanted to become smart and capable grocers’ assistants, that was their affair. Her business was to teach them their work, and, for her own sake, to see that they did it. A month went by. Mrs. Postwhistle found her new assistant hard-working, willing, somewhat clumsy, but with a smile and a laugh that transformed mistakes, for which another would have been soundly rated, into welcome variations of the day’s monotony.
“If you were the sort of woman that cared to make your fortune,” said one William Clodd, an old friend of Mrs. Postwhistle’s, young Grindley having descended into the cellar to grind coffee, “I’d tell you what to do. Take a bun-shop somewhere in the neighbourhood of a girls’ school, and put that assistant of yours in the window. You’d do a roaring business.”
“There’s a mystery about ’im,” said Mrs. Postwhistle.
“Know what it is?”
“If I knew what it was, I shouldn’t be calling it a mystery,” replied Mrs. Postwhistle, who was a stylist in her way.
“How did you get him? Win him in a raffle?”
“Jones, the agent, sent ’im to me all in a ’urry. An assistant is what I really wanted, not an apprentice; but the premium was good, and the references everything one could desire.”
“Grindley, Grindley,” murmured Clodd. “Any relation to the Sauce, I wonder?”
“A bit more wholesome, I should say, from the look of him,” thought Mrs. Postwhistle.