gent enough to combine
odds and ends with such fetching effect ought to be the man to
appreciate my great--or great great-grandmother's scarf. I didn't run to
taxis when alone, and would as soon have got into one of those appalling
motor buses as leap on to the back of a mad elephant that had
berserkered out of the Zoo. Consequently, I had to walk. It was an
untidy, badly dusted day, with a hot wind; and I realized, when I caught
sight of myself in a convex mirror in the curiosity-shop window, that I
looked rather like a small female edition of Strumpelpeter.

There was a bell on the door which, like a shrill, disparaging _leit
motif_, announced me, and made me suddenly self-conscious. It hadn't
occurred to me before that there was anything to be ashamed of or
frightened about in my errand. I'd vaguely pictured the shopman as a
dear old Dickensy thing who would take a fussy interest in me and my
scarf, and who would, with a fatherly manner, press upon me a handful of
sovereigns or a banknote. But as the bell jangled, one of the most
repulsive men I ever saw looked toward the door. There was another man
in the place, talking to the first creature, and he looked up, too. Not
even the blindest bat, however, could have mistaken him for a
shopkeeper, and his being there put not only a different complexion on
the business, but on me. I felt mine turning bright pink, instead of the
usual cream that accompanies the chocolate-coloured hair and eyes with
which I advertise the industry of my French ancestors.

The shopman stared at me with a sulky look exactly like that of
Nebuchadnezzar, our boar pig from Yorkshire, which took a prize for its
nose or something. This person might have won a prize for his nose also,
if an offer had been going for large ones. The rest of his face, olive
green and fat, was in the perspective of this nose, just as the lesser
proportions of his body, such as chest and legs, were in the perspective
of his--waist. The shop was much smaller than I had expected from the
window--a place you might have swung a cat in without giving it
concussion of the brain, but not a lion; and the men--the fat proprietor
and his long, lean customer, and two suits of deformed-looking armour,
seemed almost to fill it. I've heard an actor talk about a theatre being
so tiny he was "on the audience"; and these two were on theirs, the
audience being me. I was so close to the fat one that I could see the
crumbs on the folds of h