But frequent visits had bred in Mrs. Trenchard a yet warmer intimacy. Although she had never put her feeling into words, she was determined now that the Stores was maintained solely in the Trenchard and Faunder interests. So pleasant and personally submissive had the young men and young women of the place been to her all these years, that she now regarded them with very nearly the personal benevolence that she bestowed upon her own Rebekah, Rocket, Jacob and so on. She felt that only Trenchards and Faunders could have produced an organisation whose spirit was so entirely sprung from their own views and observances. She did not defend or extol those views. There simply they were! and out of them the Stores were born. She paid her call here, therefore, rather as a Patroness visits a Hospital in which she is interested—with no conceit or false pride, but with a maternal anxiety that everything should be well and prosperous. Everything always was well and prosperous.... She was a happy Patroness! “That’s a splendid ham!” were invariably her first words, and “I do like the way they arrange things here,” her second. She could have wandered, very happily, all day from compartment to compartment, stopping continually to observe, to touch, to smile, to blow her nose (being moved, very often, quite emotionally) to beam happily upon the customers and then to turn, with a little smile of intimacy, to the young men in frock coats and shiny hair, as though she would say: “We’ve got a good crowd to-day. Everyone seems comfortable ... but how can they help it when everything is so beautifully done?” Her chief pride and happiness found its ultimate crown in the furniture department. Here, hung as it was somewhere up aloft, with dark bewildering passages starting into infinity on every side of it, was the place that her soul truly loved. She could gaze all day upon those sofas and chairs. Those wonderful leather couches of dark red and dark blue, so solid, so stern in their unrelenting opposition to flighty half-and-half, so self-supporting and self-satisfying, so assured of propriety and comfort and solid value for your money. She would sink slowly into a huge leather arm-chair, and from her throne smile upon the kind gentleman who washed his hands in front of her. “And how much is this one?” “Nine pounds, eight and sixpence, ma’am.” “Really. Nine pounds, eight and sixpence. It’s a splendid chair.” “It is indeed, ma’am. We’ve sold more than two dozen of this same article in this last fortnight. A great demand just now.” “And so there ought to be—more than two dozen! Well, I’m not surprised—an excellent chair.” “Perhaps we can send it for you? Or you prefer—?” “No, thank you. Not to-day. But I must say that it’s wonderful for the money. That sofa over there—”