Tottenham’s is situated in one of the great thoroughfares which lead out of the heart of London, towards one of its huge suburbs. It consists of an immense square pile of building, facing to four different streets, with frontage of plate-glass windows, and masses of costly shawls and silks appearing through. To many people, but these were mostly ladies, Tottenham’s was a kind of fairyland. It represented everything, from substantial domestic linen to fairy webs of lace, which money could buy. In the latter particular, it is true, Tottenham’s was limited; it possessed only the productions of modern fingers, the filmy fabrics of Flanders and France; but its silks, its velvets, its magnificences of shawl and drapery, its untold wealth in the homelier shape of linen and cambric, were unsurpassed anywhere, and the fame of them had spread throughout London, nay, throughout England. The name of this great establishment caused a flutter of feeling through all the Home Counties, and up even to the Northern borders. People sent their orders to Tottenham’s from every direction of the compass. The mass of its clients were, perhaps, not highly fashionable, though even the _crême de la crême_ sometimes made a raid into the vast place, which was reported cheap, and where fashionable mothers were apt to assure each other that people, who knew what was what, might often pick up very nice things indeed at half the price which Élise would ask, not to speak of Worth. Persons who know what Worth has last invented, and how Élise works, have an immense advantage in this way over their humble neighbours. But the humble neighbours themselves were very good customers, and bought more largely, if with less discrimination. And the middle class, like one man, or rather like one woman, patronized Tottenham’s. It bought its gowns there, and its carpets and its thread and needles, everything that is wanted, in a house. It provided its daughters’ _trousseaux_, and furnished its sons’ houses out of this universal emporium; not the chairs and tables, it is true, but everything else. The arrangements of the interior were so vast and bewildering as to drive a stranger wild, though the _habitués_ glided about from counter to counter with smiling readiness. There were as many departments as in the Home Office, but everybody looked after his own department, which is not generally the case in the Imperial shop; and the hum of voices, the gliding about of many feet, the rustle of many garments, the vague sound and sentiment of a multitude pervaded the alleys of counters, the crowded passages between, where group was jostled by group, and not an inch of space left unoccupied.