"Is that ledge hard, Miss Vincent? Couldn't someone get her a cushion? Make yourself at home. Why don't you come round the counter and sit on the customers' laps?... We must find you a comfortable seat somewhere—and change of air, too. Mallingbridge isn't agreeing with your constitution, if you feel as slack as all this."
Like the people of his house, these people of his shop feared him, and, perhaps without putting the thoughts into words, or troubling to quote adages, understood that beggars on horseback always ride with reckless disregard of the safety and comfort of the humble companions with whom they were recently tramping along the hard road, and that no master is so tyrannical as a promoted servant. In the opinion of the shop-assistants, he could not go to London too often or stay there too long.
While he was away this time, Mears came to Mrs. Marsden with a long face and a gloomy voice, and gave her the delayed information as to her husband's Christmas programme.
The new underground floor was to be used for a grand Bazaar, and Mears had been told to win her round to the idea.
Mears himself hated the idea. He thought the bazaar a brainless plagiarism of Bence's, and altogether unworthy of Thompson's. It would be exactly like Bence's, but on a much larger scale—beneath the good respectable shop, a cheap and nasty shop, in which catchpenny travesties of decent articles would be the only wares; fancy stationery, sham jewellery, spurious metals; horrid little clocks that won't go, knives and scissors that won't cut, collar-boxes more flimsy than the collars they are intended to hold—everything beastly that crumples, bends, or breaks before you can get home with it.
"But he won't abandon the idea," said Mears. "That's a certainty. He's mad keen on it. The only thing is for you to use your influence—and I'll back you up solid—to persuade him to modify it."
And Mears strongly advocated modification on these lines: make the bazaar a fitting annex,—substitute boots and shoes for the sixpenny toys, good leather trunks for the paper boxes, nice engravings for the coloured photographs,—offer the public genuine stuff and not trash.
Accordingly, Mr. Marsden, as soon as he returned, was begged by his partner and his manager to grant their joint petition for a slightly modified Christmas carnival. But he said it was too late. They ought to have gone into the matter earlier.
He had bought the trash,—had engaged his London girls,—was ready; and like a general on the eve of campaign, he could not be bothered with advice from subordinate officers.