It would never be what a man from the city would call a big business. He never wanted it so big that he couldn’t keep his hand on it all. It would be his business, rather than a big one. But at that, he saw now, especially with Nell getting a salary for doing the advertising, it would bring them in more income than anybody else in town dreamed of having. They could live as they pleased as far as spending went. Not that that was the important part—but still a very agreeable one.
He was sure of all this, sure! By God, he couldn’t fail! The cards were stacked for him. A prosperous town, just the right size; goodwill and a monopoly of trade that ran back for forty years; no big city within fifty miles—why, even the trains providentially ran at hours that were inconvenient for people who wished to go to the city to shop. And no rivals worth mentioning; nobody he couldn’t put out of business inside ten years. He thought again, as he had so many times, how miraculous it was that in the ten years since Uncle Charley had lost his grip, no Jew merchant had cut in to snatch the rich heart out of the situation. Nobody could do that now. He had the jump on the world.
With half-shut eyes he let himself bask for a few minutes in this glorious vision; then, picking up his hat and overcoat he left the office and, alert to every impression behind his pleasant mask of affability, moved down between household linens and silk goods to the front door and stepped out into the street. He had seen out of the tail of his eye how that Boardman girl was making a mess of showing lining silks to a customer, and made a mental note to call in Miss Atkinson, the floor superintendent, and tell her to give the girl a lesson or two on draping silks as you showed them and making sure that the price-tag was where the customer could get the price without having to ask for it.
He was really on his way to the bank, but as he stood in the front door, he saw that McCarthy was dressing a window for the sporting-goods department and decided to go across the street to look at it. Jerome was convinced that window-dressers never back far enough off from their work, never get the total effect. Like everybody else they lose themselves in details. He stepped across to the opposite side of the street and stood there, mingling with the other passersby.
As he looked back towards the store, he noticed a tall woman coming rapidly down the street. His eye was taken at once by the quality of her gait. He sometimes thought that he judged people more by the way they walked than by any other standard. He always managed to get a would-be employee to walk across the room before taking her on. This tall, dark-haired woman in the well-made dark coat had just the sort of step he liked to see, vigorous and swift, and yet unhurried. He wondered who she was.
He saw her slow her pace as she approached the store and stand for a moment looking in at McCarthy fussing with his baseball bats and bicycle-lamps. She really looked at him, too, as few people ever look at anything, as if she were thinking about what she was looking at, and not about something in her own head. He had a good view of her face now, a big-featured, plain face that looked as though she might be bad-tempered but had plenty of motive-power. She was perhaps forty years old. He wondered what she was thinking about McCarthy.
She turned into the store now. Oh, she was a customer. Well, she was one they wanted to give satisfaction to. He stepped back across the street and into the store to make sure that the salesperson to whom she addressed herself was attentive. But she was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she had gone directly upstairs.
He went along the aisle, casting as he went that instinctively attentive look of his on the notions and ribbons, and up the stairs to the mezzanine floor where his office was. He meant to leave his hat and coat there and go on in search of the new customer. He heard a woman’s voice inside the accounting-room saying, “Will you tell me, please, where Mr. Willing’s office is.”
He knew in a moment, without seeing her, that the voice belonged to the woman he had seen. That was the kind of voice she would have.
“This is Mr. Willing,” he said, coming into the accounting-room behind her. “Won’t you come with me?”
Arrived in his office, she took the chair to which he motioned her and said at once, in a voice which he divined to be more tense than usual, “This is Mrs. Lester Knapp, Mr. Willing. You said, you remember. … You wrote on a card that you would do something to help us. I thought perhaps you could let me try to fill my husband’s place. We need the money very much. I would do my best to learn.”
Mr. Willing had the sure prescience of a man whose antennae are always sensitive to what concerns his own affairs. He had an intuition that something important
