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Updated: May 13, 2025
Violet was not tired; but she was tired of Granville. After six weeks of it she began to long secretly for Starker's Millinery Saloons. In the saloon you walked looking beautiful through a flowery and a feathery grove of hats. You had nothing to do but to try hats on and to sell them, and each sale was a personal triumph for the seller.
He was not making a dash for it; he was strolling casually and without hope in the direction of Starker's, and he saw her walking away, arm in arm with another girl, a girl he had never seen before. He would have overtaken them but that the presence of the girl deterred him.
She didn't, but she was not going to say so lest he should think that she was discontented. "They are they decent to you at Starker's?" "Of course they are. I would like," said Winny, in her grandest manner, "to see anybody trying it on with me." "Oh, well, I suppose it's all right if you like it. But I thought perhaps you didn't." "You'd no business to think." "Can't help it. Born thinkin'."
But, though he hung round Starker's evening after evening, from the middle to the very end of October, he never once caught sight of Violet Usher. Winny he caught, as often as not, now that he had given up trying to catch her; sometimes he caught her at Starker's, sometimes at their old corner by the Gymnasium; and whenever he caught her he walked home with her.
Winny was clever, and she had a berth as book-keeper in Starker's, one of the smaller drapers' shops in Oxford Street, near Woolridge's. Her position was as good as his, yet she only earned five pounds a month to his eight. And he hated to think of Winny working, anyway. "Winny," he said, suddenly, "do you like book-keeping?" "Of course I do," said Winny.
They might go for a sort of picnic to Richmond Park, and she must come back to supper. That was his idea, his solution, his inspiration; that she must come; that she must be asked, must be implored to come; but as a guest, in high honor, and in festival. They settled it. And still he lingered awkwardly. "I say is it true that you've left Starker's?" "Yes." "What did you do that for, Winky?"
And not only did Violet long for Starker's Millinery Saloons, she longed for Oxford Street, she longed for the adventurous setting forth in bus or tram, with the feeling that anything might happen before the day was over; she longed for the still more adventurous stepping out of the little door in Starker's shutter into the amorously hovering crowd, for the furtive looking round with eyes all bright for the encounter; above all she longed for somebody, no matter who, to come, somebody to meet her somewhere and take her to the Empire.
And she had kept her job at Starker's, and meant to keep it for another year or so. Fred wasn't going to have any kids he couldn't provide for. Ranny's case had been a warning to him. And Ranny's case was lamentable that winter, after he had paid for his suit. They lived almost entirely now on hampers sent from Hertfordshire.
It was as if, set his feet southward as he would, they were turned back irresistibly and drawn eastward in the direction of the door. There was nothing furtive and secret in his haunting. He had a right to hang about Starker's, for he knew Miss Usher now. He had been formally introduced to her by Winny as they left the Polytechnic together, on the night of the Grand Display.
Johnson's operations and his premises were so diminutive that for Winny after Starker's the descent seemed awful. "Are you sure she wanted it?" "She must have wanted it pretty badly when she's willing to take seven bob a week less screw. And if she'd waited till Michaelmas she'd have got her rise." Ranny bent his head low over his cup.
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