Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriageOnions, Oliver
General
Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriage
Onions, Oliver
Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
Mr. Miller had looked up in an etymological dictionary the meaning
of the word "gospel," and had found that it meant "good tidings";
and that, he said, was exactly what advertisement meant too. He had
looked up other words also--Valour, Hero, Dignity, Gentleman--and he
was for restoring their dimmed lustre. And since he saw things in
their true perspective, he saw also the only way in which that could
be done. To cut the cackle and come (like Mr. Wellcome) to the horses,
he proposed to do it by a putting of the founts of honour to purposes
of irrigation. Commerce had vulgarized itself; dignity must therefore
be restored to it from where dignity was to be had in quantities
sufficient if necessary to throw at the birds--from above. One day Mr.
Miller, passing a more than usually ingenious advertisement in a shop
window, had stated his point of view in twenty words. "Look at that!"
he had exclaimed to his companion. "Now I say the man who invented
that was a live wire. He connects. You feel the man. But what does the
British public know about him? If he'd rescued a comrade under fire
he'd have got your V.C. for it, and everybody'd have known all there
was to him; but you stop a hundred people on this sidewalk and ask 'em
his name, and if a single one of 'em can tell you then the drinks are
on me!"
It is true that Mr. Miller did not say that he wanted the Cross
bestowed (as it were) For Value instead of For Valour, but that was
the direction in which his thoughts strayed. Before his perspective
had become quite so clear he had tried to get permission for the Royal
Standard to float over Hallowells' new premises (the Union Jack having
become common trade property, and so of no more value to one emporium
than to another); and though he had failed, it was still better to have
failed in such an attempt than to have succeeded in the funny stunts
that had been pushed underground the fall before last. It remained an
ideal for commerce to lift up its eyes to.
In the business sense, though in none other, Mr. Miller had paid a
good deal of court to Dorothy Lennard--or perhaps less at first to
Dorothy than to Lady Tasker's niece. Nominally Dorothy was still "third
hand" in the fashion studio; but Miss Benson had been wise enough to
leave her free to do pretty much as she liked (without that freedom
the studio would never have got Hallowells' catalogue, nor have become
what to all intents and purposes it now was--one of Hallowells'
departments), and Dorothy's intimacy with Mr. Miller had ripened
quickly after the famous buying of Glenister's picture, "Sir Walter and
the Cloak," at the Academy more than a year before. Dorothy had gone
round the Exhibition with Mr. Miller, and had seen him stop long before
the picture and presently return to it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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