"It'll be a great disappointment to me if they don't clear us out in three months from now. Of course they haven't discovered yet what we're offering them. But they will. I go on the double policy—play down to your public in one department, but try to lift your public in another. That's the way to keep alive."
And, as they left the Japanese treasures and strolled about the upper floor, he rattled off his glib catch-words.
"These are hustling times. Get a move on somehow. That's what I tell them—They'll soon tumble to it."
He parted from her near the door of communication.
"Ta-ta, old girl.... Oh, by the way, I shan't be in to dinner to-night—or to-morrow either. I'm off to London. I'm wanted there about my Christmas Baz——" And he checked himself. "But I'll ask old Mears to tell you all about that."
Then he ran downstairs, two steps at a time, and swaggered here and there between the counters to impress the assistants with his hustlingly Napoleonic air.
Occasionally he loved to step forward, wave aside the assistant, and himself serve a customer. He thoroughly enjoyed the awe-struck admiration of the shop when he thus granted it a display of his skill. It was his only real gift—the salesman art; and it never failed him.
But it was something that he could not impart. Assistants who imitated his method—trying to catch the smiling, almost chaffing manner that could immediately convert a grumpy lethargic critic into a prompt and cheerful buyer—were merely familiar and impudent, and ended by huffing the customer.
And the governor, when he happened to detect want of success in one of his young gentlemen or young ladies, came down like a hundred of bricks.
He treated the two sexes quite impartially, and the women could not say that he bullied the men worse than he bullied them. But he had a deadly sort of satire that the younger girls dreaded more than the angriest storm of abuse. Thus if he saw one of them sitting down, he would address her with apparently amiable solicitude.