He had a persuasive, hail-fellow well-met air with him which appealed to customers of this sort, and they said to one another:
“What’s the good of throwing money away when you can get a coat and skirt at Lynn’s that nobody knows don’t come from Paris?”
Mr. Sampson was very proud of his friendship with the popular favourites whose frocks he made, and when he went out to dinner at two o’clock on Sunday with Miss Victoria Virgo—“she was wearing that powder blue we made her and I lay she didn’t let on it come from us, I ’ad to tell her meself that if I ’adn’t designed it with my own ’ands I’d have said it must come from Paquin”—at her beautiful house in Tulse Hill, he regaled the department next day with abundant details. Philip had never paid much attention to women’s clothes, but in course of time he began, a little amused at himself, to take a technical interest in them. He had an eye for colour which was more highly trained than that of anyone in the department, and he had kept from his student days in Paris some knowledge of line. Mr. Sampson, an ignorant man conscious of his incompetence, but with a shrewdness that enabled him to combine other people’s suggestions, constantly asked the opinion of the assistants in his department in making up new designs; and he had the quickness to see that Philip’s criticisms were valuable. But he was very jealous, and would never allow that he took anyone’s advice. When he had altered some drawing in accordance with Philip’s suggestion, he always finished up by saying:
“Well, it comes round to my own idea in the end.”
One day, when Philip had been at the shop for five months, Miss Alice Antonia, the well-known serio-comic, came in and asked to see Mr. Sampson. She was a large woman, with flaxen hair, and a boldly painted face, a metallic voice, and the breezy manner of a comedienne accustomed to be on friendly terms with the gallery boys of provincial music-halls. She had a new song and wished Mr. Sampson to design a costume for her.
“I want something striking,” she said. “I don’t want any old thing you know. I want something different from what anybody else has.”
Mr. Sampson, bland and familiar, said he was quite certain they could get her the very thing she required. He showed her sketches.
“I know there’s nothing here that would do, but I just want to show you the kind of thing I would suggest.”
“Oh no, that’s not the sort of thing at all,” she said, as she glanced at them impatiently. “What I want is something that’ll just hit ’em in the jaw and make their front teeth rattle.”
“Yes, I quite understand, Miss Antonia,” said the buyer, with a bland smile, but his eyes grew blank and stupid.