“What is she thinking?... I know Katherine has hurt her terribly. She oughtn’t to wear a hat like that: it doesn’t suit her a bit. Why isn’t it _I_ who have forgotten, and Katie here instead to console her? Only then she wouldn’t want consolation....” As they walked up the steps of the Stores they were stared at by a number of little dogs on chains, who all seemed to assert their triumphant claims on somebody’s especial affections. The little dogs stirred Mrs. Trenchard’s unhappiness, without her knowing why. All down Victoria Street she had been thinking to herself: “Katherine never forgot before—never. It was only this morning—if it had even been yesterday—but this morning! Millie doesn’t understand, and she didn’t want to come—Katie....” She walked slowly into the building, and was at once received by that friendly, confused smell of hams and medicines which is the Stores’ note of welcome. Lights shone, warmth eddied in little gusts of hot air from corner to corner: there was much conversation, but all of a very decent kind: ladies, not very grand ones and not very poor ones, but comfortable, motherly, housekeeping ladies were everywhere to be seen. No wonder, surely, that Mrs. Trenchard loved the Stores! Here was everything gathered in from the ends of the earth that was solid and sound and real. Here were no extravagances, no decadencies, no flowing creations with fair outsides and no heart to them, nothing foreign nor degenerate. However foreign an article might be before it entered the Stores, once inside those walls it adopted itself at once to the claims of a Cathedral City—even the Eastern carpets, stained though their past lives might be with memories of the Harem, recognised that their future lay along the floor of a Bishop’s study, a Major’s drawing-room or the dining-room of a country rectory. If ever Mrs. Trenchard was alarmed by memories of foreign influences, of German invasions, or Armenian atrocities, she had only to come to the Stores to be entirely reassured. It would be better for our unbalanced and hysterical alarmists did they visit the Stores more frequently....