mpose 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
days of Houghton's Great Sales began. Houghton's Great Bargain
Events were really events. After some years of hanging on, he let go
splendidly. He marked down his prints, his chintzes, his dimities
and his veilings with a grand and lavish hand. Bang went his blue
pencil through 3/11, and nobly he subscribed 1/0-3/4. Prices fell
like nuts. A lofty one-and-eleven rolled down to six-three, 1/6
magically shrank into 4-3/4d, whilst good solid prints exposed
themselves at 3-3/4d per yard.

Now this was really an opportunity. Moreover the goods, having
become a little stale during their years of ineffectuality, were