ladies--everything James handled was for ladies, he scorned the coarser
sex--: weird and wonderful winter coats for ladies, of thick, black,
pockmarked cloth, stood and flourished their bear-fur cuffs in the
background, while tippets, boas, muffs and winter-fancies coquetted in
front of the window-space. Friday-night crowds gathered outside: the
gas-lamps shone their brightest: James Houghton hovered in the
background like an author on his first night in the theatre. The
result was a sensation. Ten villages stared and crushed round the plate
glass. It was a sensation: but what sensation! In the breasts of the
crowd, wonder, admiration, _fear_, and ridicule. Let us stress the word
fear. The inhabitants of Woodhouse were afraid lest James Houghton
should impose his standards upon them. His goods were in excellent
taste: but his customers were in as bad taste as possible. They stood
outside and pointed, giggled, and jeered. Poor James, like an author on
his first night, saw his work fall more than flat.
But still he believed in his own excellence: and quite justly. What
he failed to perceive was that the crowd hated excellence. Woodhouse
wanted a gently graduated progress in mediocrity, a mediocrity so
stale and flat that it fell outside the imagination of any sensitive
mortal. Woodhouse wanted a series of vulgar little thrills, as one
tawdry mediocrity was imported from Nottingham or Birmingham to take
the place of some tawdry mediocrity which Nottingham and Birmingham
had already discarded. That Woodhouse, as a very condition of its
own being, hated any approach to originality or real taste, this
James Houghton could never learn. He thought he had not been clever
enough, when he had been far, far too clever already. He always
thought that Dame Fortune was a capricious and fastidious dame, a
sort of Elizabeth of Austria or Alexandra, Princess of Wales,
elegant beyond his grasp. Whereas Dame Fortune, even in London or
Vienna, let alone in Woodhouse, was a vulgar woman of the middle and
lower middle-class, ready to put her heavy foot on anything that was
not vulgar, machine-made, and appropriate to the herd. When he saw
his delicate originalities, as well as his faint flourishes of
draper's fantasy, squashed flat under the calm and solid foot of
vulgar Dame Fortune, he fell into fits of depression bordering on
mysticism, and talked to his wife in a vague way of higher
influences and the angel Israfel. She, poor lady, was thoroughly
scared by Israfel, and completely unhooked by the vagaries of James.
At last--we hurry down the slope of James' misfortunes--the real
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