Dorothy liked Mr. Miller. Once you got over his remarkable aptitude for sincerities he had an excellent heart. Nevertheless she could not imagine why he had come. She shuddered as he seemed for a moment to be once more on the point of removing his shoes at the door of the Mosque of Motherhood, but apparently he thought better of it. Squaring his shoulders again, and no doubt greatly fortified by his late exercise, he said, “Well, I always feel more of a man after I felt the throb of a fellow-creature’s heart. That’s so. And now you’ll be wondering what’s brought me up here? Well, the fact is, Mrs. Tasker, I’m wurried. I got wurries. You can see the wurry-map on my face. Hallowells’ is wurrying me. I ain’t going to tell you Hallowells’ ain’t what it was in its pammy days; it may be, or it may not; mebbe you’ve heard the talk that’s going around?”
“No,” said Dorothy.
“Is that so? Well, there is talk going around. There’s a whole push of people, knocking us all the time. They ain’t of much account themselves, but they knock us. It’s a power the inferior mind has. And I say I’m wurried about it.”
Dorothy, in spite of her “No,” had heard of the “knocking” of Hallowell and Smiths’, and her heart gave an excited little jump at the thought that flashed across her mind. Did Hallowells’ want her back? The firm had been launched upon London with every resource of publicity; Dorothy herself had been the author of its crowning device; and whereas the motto of older firms had been “Courtesy Costs Nothing,” Hallowells’ had vastly improved upon this. Courtesy had, as a matter of fact, cost them a good deal; but the rewards of the investment had been magnificent. Mr. Miller had known that if you say to people often enough “See how courteous I am,” you are to all intents and purposes courteous. But what Mr. Miller had not known had been the precise point at which it is necessary to begin to build up a strained reputation again. Commercial credit too, like those joints Stan carved, comes in in twopence-halfpennies but goes out in threepences.... And so the “knocking” had begun. Rumours had got about that Hallowells’ was a shop where you were asked, after a few unsuitable articles had been shown to you, whether you didn’t intend to buy anything, and where you might wait for ten minutes at a counter while two assistants settled a private difference behind it. Did Mr. Miller want her help in restoring the firm’s fair name? Did he intend to offer her another contract? Were there to be more of Hallowells’ plump, ringing sovereigns—that she would know better how to take care of this time? It was with difficulty that she kept her composure as Mr. Miller continued:
“There’s no denying but what inferior minds have that power,” he went sorrowfully on. “They can’t build up an enterprise, but they can knock, and they been good and busy. You haven’t heard of it? Well, that’s good as far as it goes, but they been at it for all that. Now I don’t want to knock back at your country, Mrs. Tasker, but it seems to me that’s the English character. You’re hostile to the noo. The noo gives you cold feet. You got a terrific capacity for stopping put. Your King Richard Core de Lion did things in a certain way, and it ain’t struck you yet that he’s been stiff and straight quite a while. And so when you see something with snap and life to it you start knocking.” Mr. Miller spoke almost bitterly. “But I ain’t holding you personally responsible, Mrs. Tasker. I reckon you’re a wonderful woman. Yours is a reel old family, and if anybody’s the right to knock it’s you; but you appreciate the noo. You look at it in the light of history. You got the sense of world-progress. You’re a sort of Lady Core de Lion to-day. I haven’t forgotten the Big Idee you started us off with. And so I come to you, and tell you, straight and fair, we want you.”
Dorothy was tingling with excitement; but she took up a piece of sewing—the same piece on which she had bent her modest gaze when she had machinated against her aunt on the afternoon on which Lady Tasker had come on, weary and thirsty, from the Witan. It was a piece she kept for such occasions as these. She stitched demurely, and Mr. Miller went on again:—
“We want you. We want those bright feminine brains of yours, Mrs. Tasker. And your ladies’ intooition. We’re stuck. We want another Idee like the last. And so we come to the department where we got satisfaction before.”
Dorothy spoke slowly. She was glad the pond-room was beautifully furnished—glad, too, that the hours Ruth spent over her “brights” were not spent in vain. The porcelain gleamed in her cabinets and the silver twinkled on her tables. At any rate she did not look poor.
“This is rather a surprise,” she said. “I hardly know what to say. I hadn’t thought of taking on another contract.”