“I know as she’s the best saleswoman, and the most ladylike-looking young lady in the house,” cried Watson; and then he perceived his slip of grammar, and blushed hotter than ever; for he was an ambitious young man, and had been instructed up to the point of knowing that his native English stood in need of improvement, and that bad grammar was against his rising in life.
“That will do then; you can go,” said Mr. Tottenham. “Opinion is not evidence. Come, Robinson, if it’s making a feud in the house, I had better, I suppose, go into it at once.”
“And I, perhaps, had better withdraw too,” said Edgar, whom this strange and sudden revelation of human tumults going on in the great house of business had interested in spite of himself.
“Stay; you are impartial, and have an unbiassed judgment,” said Mr. Tottenham. “Now, Robinson, let us hear what you have got to say.”
Robinson approached with a world of care upon his face. Edgar having allowed his fancy to be taken possession of by the Member-of-Parliament theory, could not help the notion that this good worried man had risen to call for a Committee upon some subject involving peril to the nation, some mysterious eruption of Jesuits or Internationalists, or Foreign Office squabble. He was only the head of the shawl and cloak department in Tottenham’s; but it is quite marvellous how much humanity resembles itself, though the circumstances were so unlike.
Mr. Robinson had not much more than begun his story. He was in the preamble, discoursing, as his prototype in the House of Commons would have done, upon the general danger to society which was involved in carelessness and negligence of one such matter as that he was about to bring before the House—when a tap was heard at the door, a little sharp tap, half defiant, half coquettish, sounding as if the applicant, while impatient for admittance, might turn away capriciously, when the door was opened. Both the judge and the prosecutor evidently divined at once who it was.
“Come in,” said Mr. Tottenham; “Come in!” for the summons was not immediately obeyed.
Then there entered a—person, to use the safe yet not very respectful word which Mr. J. S. Mill rescued from the hands of flunkeys and policemen—a female figure, to speak more romantically, clad in elegant black silken robes, very well made, with dark hair elaborately dressed; tall, slight, graceful, one of those beings to be met with everywhere in the inner recesses of great shops like Tottenham’s, bearing all the outward aspect of ladies, moving about all day long upon rich carpets, in a warm luxurious atmosphere, “trying on” one beautiful garment after another, and surveying themselves in great mirrors as they pass and repass. The best of feminine society ebbs and flows around these soft-voiced and elegant creatures—duchesses, princesses, who look like washerwomen beside them, and young girls often not more pretty or graceful. They are the Helots of the female fashionable world, and, at the same time, to some degree, its despots; for does not many a dumpy woman appear ridiculous in the elegant garb which was proved before her eyes so beautiful and becoming upon the slim straight form of the “young person” who exhibited and sold if?
Miss Lockwood entered, with her head well up, in one of the attitudes which are considered most elegant in those pretty coloured pictures of the “Modes,” which, to her class of young ladies, are as the Louvre and the National Gallery thrown into one. She was no longer, except from a professional point of view, to be considered absolutely as a “young lady.” Her face, which was a handsome face, was slightly worn, and her age must have been a year or two over thirty; but, as her accuser admitted, and as her defender asserted, a more “ladylike-looking” person, or a better figure for showing off shawl or mantle had never been seen in Tottenham’s or any other house of business. This was her great quality. She came in with a little sweep and rustle of her long black silken train; her dress, like her figure, was her stock-in-trade.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” she said in an abrupt yet airy tone, angry yet sensible withal of those personal advantages which made it something of a joke that anyone should presume to find fault with her. “I hear my character is being taken away behind my back, and I have come, please, to defend myself.”