he, must have climbed up with a heavy heart, to lie and face the gloomy
Bastille of mahogany, the great cupboard opposite, or to turn wearily
sideways to the great cheval mirror, which performed a perpetual and
hideous bow before her grace. Such furniture! It could never be removed
from the room.
The little child was born in the second year. And then James Houghton
decamped to a small, half-furnished bedroom at the other end of the
house, where he slept on a rough board and played the anchorite for the
rest of his days. His wife was left alone with her baby and the
built-in furniture. She developed heart disease, as a result of nervous
repressions.
But like a butterfly James fluttered over his fabrics. He was a tyrant
to his shop-girls. No French marquis in a Dickens' novel could have
been more elegant and _raffiné_ and heartless. The girls detested him.
And yet, his curious refinement and enthusiasm bore them away. They
submitted to him. The shop attracted much curiosity. But the
poor-spirited Woodhouse people were weak buyers. They wearied James
Houghton with their demand for common zephyrs, for red flannel which
they would scallop with black worsted, for black alpacas and bombazines
and merinos. He fluffed out his silk-striped muslins, his India
cotton-prints. But the natives shied off as if he had offered them the
poisoned robes of Herakles.
There was a sale. These sales contributed a good deal to Mrs.
Houghton's nervous heart-disease. They brought the first signs of wear
and tear into the face of James Houghton. At first, of course, he
merely marked down, with discretion, his less-expensive stock of prints
and muslins, nuns-veilings and muslin delaines, with a few fancy
braidings and trimmings in guimp or bronze to enliven the affair. And
Woodhouse bought cautiously.
After the sale, however, James Houghton felt himself at liberty to
plunge into an orgy of new stock. He flitted, with a tense look on his
face, to Manchester. After which huge bundles, bales and boxes arrived
in Woodhouse, and were dumped on the pavement of the shop. Friday
evening came, and with it a revelation in Houghton's window: the first
piqués, the first strangely-woven and honey-combed toilet covers and
bed quilts, the first frill-caps and aprons for maid-servants: a wonder
in white. That was how James advertised it. "A Wonder in White." Who
knows but that he had been reading Wilkie Collins' famous novel!
As the nine days of the wonder-in-white passed and receded, James
disappeared in the direction of London. A few Fridays later he came out
with his Winter Touch. Weird and wonderful winter coats, for
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