Mrs. Marsden had given the nurse a sovereign. She hurried back to the church, and tipped the clerk and the pew-owner. Then she trudged off to the railway station; and went home, like Sisyphus or the Danaides, to take up her apparently impossible task.
XX
Two years had passed, and the grand old shop was plainly going down.
It could not satisfy chance customers; it had begun to lose its staunchest supporters. Gradually and fatally, cruel words were going round the town and far out into the country villages. "It isn't what it used to be.... It has had its day.... Nothing lasts forever."
Fewer and fewer carriages of the local gentry were to be seen standing outside its doors. Farmers' wives, who for more than a decade had driven into Mallingbridge and spent Saturday afternoons picking and choosing at Thompson's, now did all their shopping somewhere else. The whole world seemed to be discovering that you could get whatever you wanted quite as well and more cheaply somewhere else. And from somewhere else, your goods—no matter where you lived, whether far or near—were delivered free of charge, with marvellous celerity, and "returnable if damaged."
Inside the sinking shop every assistant too well knew that horrid expression, "Somewhere else."
It paralysed the tongues of the shop girls; it struck them stupid. Each time they heard it, their courage waned, their hopes drooped; they gave up struggling.
"Thank you, I won't trouble you any more."