Manchester House, illuminating its dark rooms with her own sure,
radiant presence: her silver-white hair, and her pale, heavy,
reposeful face seemed to give off a certain radiance. She seemed to
give weight, ballast, and repose to the staggering and bewildered
home. She controlled the maid, and suggested the meals--meals which
James ate without knowing what he ate. She brought in flowers and
books, and, very rarely, a visitor. Visitors were out of place in
the dark sombreness of Manchester House. Her flowers charmed the
petulant invalid, her books she sometimes discussed with the airy
James: after which discussions she was invariably filled with
exasperation and impatience, whilst James invariably retired to the
shop, and was heard raising his musical voice, which the work-girls
hated, to one or other of the work-girls.
James certainly had an irritating way of speaking of a book. He
talked of incidents, and effects, and suggestions, as if the whole
thing had just been a sensational-ęsthetic attribute to himself. Not
a grain of human feeling in the man, said Miss Frost, flushing pink
with exasperation. She herself invariably took the human line.
Meanwhile the shops began to take on a hopeless and frowsy look.
After ten years' sales, spring sales, summer sales, autumn sales,
winter sales, James began to give up the drapery dream. He himself
could not bear any more to put the heavy, pock-holed black cloth
coat, with wild bear cuffs and collar, on to the stand. He had
marked it down from five guineas to one guinea, and then, oh ignoble
day, to ten-and-six. He nearly kissed the gipsy woman with a basket
of tin saucepan-lids, when at last she bought it for five shillings,
at the end of one of his winter sales. But even she, in spite of the
bitter sleety day, would not put the coat on in the shop. She
carried it over her arm down to the Miners' Arms. And later, with a
shock that really hurt him, James, peeping bird-like out of his shop
door, saw her sitting driving a dirty rag-and-bone cart with a
green-white, mouldy pony, and flourishing her arms like some wild
and hairy-decorated squaw. For the long bear-fur, wet with sleet,
seemed like a _chevaux de frise_ of long porcupine quills round her
fore-arms and her neck. Yet such good, such wonderful material! James
eyed it for one moment, and then fled like a rabbit to the stove in
his back regions.
The higher powers did not seem to fulfil the terms of treaty which
James hoped for. He began to back out from the Entente. The Sunday
School was a great trial to him. Instead of being carried away by
his grace and eloquence, the nasty louts of colliery boys and girls
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