"Now that's what I call a picture, Miss Lennard," he had said at last. "A reel thoughtful bit of art. I don't care whether you call it pre-Raphaelite or whatever you call it--you as a lady-artist can put it all over me there--but speaking as a plain man of business I say that picture just appeals to me. It calls me. I feel it. It's got meaning. There's your Raleigh, look. And there's your Queen Bess. And I ask you to observe the chivalrous spirit of it. That's the reel old-world English courtesy. That's the thing that hasn't got to be let die. Hallowells' has got to pitch its key up to that. It's got to be as if there was a puddle in front of the Grand Entrance every day, and every lady-shopper was a Queen, and Hallowells' was"--Mr. Miller had made a low, sweeping gesture with both his arms--"spreading its Cloak. That's the deportment I want for our Hosts. Where do they keep the Sales Department here?"
And, that an object-lesson should be ever before his Departmental Hosts' eyes, Mr. Miller had bought the picture.
How Hallowells' had contrived, during the past two years, with an army of painters and gilders, carpenters and shopfitters, plasterers and electricians and inspectors and engineers swarming all over the place, that business should be "carried on as usual during rebuilding" was nothing short of a modern miracle; but so it had been. And the gradual rising of the visible edifice had been accompanied, course by course and tier by tier, by bright palatial uprearings in Mr. Miller's busy brain. If the weather should hold for another month, all was expected to be ready for the Grand Inauguration in the spring; and even if the weather did not hold, the impression had somehow got about that the weather must be a mightier power even than had been supposed to be able to postpone an event of such magnitude.... But all this is ancient history now. London knows its Hallowells' and the wonders that the man who held its Portfolio of Publicity (for surely he was entitled to a seat in the Cabinet of the World's Commerce) called forth. It has accepted the Hallowell touch. It knows that its shopwalkers rank as Marshals and its head-salesmen as Hosts. It knows that the employé who would win his spurs at Hallowells' must fast and keep his vigil before the picture of Sir Walter and the Cloak. The funny stunt _has_ taken the full count. Mr. Miller _has_ corrected the perspective of things.... Therefore pass we on to how Dorothy Lennard had now and then a voice in certain of the tertiary wonders of the organization and how into the vast complexity she had contrived to drag the name of Mr. Hamilton Dix.
