He went to his point without apologetic explanation.
“You know all the things any kind of a lady ought to have,” he said--“all the things that would make any one feel comfortable and as if they’d got plenty? Useful things as well as ornamental ones?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied, with rising interest. “I have been in the establishment thirty years.”
“Good business,” Tembarom replied. Already he felt relieved. “I’ve got a relation, a little old lady, and I want her to fix herself out just as she ought to be fixed. Now, what I’m afraid of is that she won’t get everything she ought to unless I manage it for her somehow beforehand. She’s got into a habit of--well, economizing. Now the time’s past for that, and I want her to get everything a woman like you would know she really wants, so that she could look her best, living in a big country house, with a relation that thinks a lot of her.”
He paused a second or so, and then went further, fixing a clear and astonishingly shrewd eye upon the head of the department listening to him.
“I found out this was a high-class place,” he explained. “I made sure of that before I came in. In a place that was second or third class there might be people who’d think they’d caught a ‘sucker’ that would take anything that was unloaded on to him, because he didn’t know. The things are for Miss Temple Barholm, and she _does_ know. I shall ask her to come here herself to-morrow morning, and I want you to take care of her, and show her the best you’ve got that’s suitable.” He seemed to like the word; he repeated it--“Suitable,” and quickly restrained a sudden, unexplainable, wide smile.
The attending lady’s name was Mrs. Mellish. Thirty years’ experience had taught her many lessons. She was a hard woman and a sharp one, but beneath her sharp hardness lay a suppressed sense of the perfect in taste. To have a customer with unchecked resources put into her hands to do her best by was an inspiring incident. A quiver of enlightenment had crossed her countenance when she had heard the name of Temple Barholm. She had a newspaper knowledge of the odd Temple Barholm story. This was the next of kin who had blacked boots in New York, and the obvious probability that he was a fool, if it had taken the form of a hope, had been promptly nipped in the bud. The type from which he was furthest removed was that of the fortune-intoxicated young man who could be obsequiously flattered into buying anything which cost money enough.