and the literary, of her five scattered
and struggling children. He could enjoy his happiest collocations and
contrasts and effects, his harmonies and varieties of toned and faded
leather and cloth, his sought color-notes and the high clearnesses,
here and there, of his white and beautifully figured price-labels, which
pleased him enough in themselves almost to console him for not
oftener having to break, on a customer's insistence, into the balanced
composition. But the dropped expanse of time-soiled canvas, the thing
of Sundays and holidays, with just his name, "Herbert Dodd, Successor,"
painted on below his uncle's antique style, the feeble penlike
flourishes already quite archaic--this ugly vacant mask, which might
so easily be taken for the mask of failure, somehow always gave him a
chill.

That had been just the sort of chill--the analogy was complete--of Kate
Cookham's last look. He supposed people doing an awfully good and sure
and steady business, in whatever line, could see a whole front turned
to vacancy that way and merely think of the hours off represented by it.
Only for this--nervously to bear it, in other words, and Herbert Dodd,
quite with the literary temperament himself, was capable of that amount
of play of fancy, or even of morbid analysis--you had to be on some
footing, you had to feel some confidence, pretty different from his own
up to now. He had never _not_ enjoyed passing his show on the other side
of the street and taking it in thence with a casual obliquity; but he
had never held optical commerce with the drawn blind for a moment longer
than he could help. It _always_ looked horribly final and as if it never
would come up again. Big and bare, with his name staring at him from the
middle, it thus offered in its grimness a turn of comparison for Miss
Cookham's ominous visage. She never wore pretty, dotty, transparent
veils, as Nan Drury did, and the words "Herbert Dodd"--save that she had
sounded them at him there two or three times more like a Meg Merrilies
or the bold bad woman in one of the melodramas of high life given during
the fine season in the pavilion at the end of Properley Pier--were
dreadfully, were permanently, seated on her lips. _She_ was grim, no
mistake.

That evening, alone in the back room above the shop, he saw so little
what he could do that, consciously demoralised for the hour, he gave way
to tears about it. Her taking a stand so incredibly "low," that was
what he cou