CHAPTER SEVEN

There was some dramatic nerve in Gissing's nature that responded
eloquently to the floorwalking job. Never, in the history of
Beagle and Company, had there been a floorwalker who threw so
much passion and zeal into his task. The very hang of his
coattails, even the erect carriage of his back, the rubbery way
in which his feet trod the aisles, showed his sense of dignity
and glamour. There seemed to be a great tradition which enriched
and upheld him. Mr. Beagle senior used to stand on the little
balcony at the rear of the main floor, transfixed with the
pleasure of seeing Gissing move among the crowded passages.
Alert, watchful, urbane, with just the ideal blend of courtesy
and condescension, he raised floorwalking to a social art. Female
customers asked him the way to departments they knew perfectly
well, for the pleasure of hearing him direct them. Business began
to improve before he had been there a week.

And how he enjoyed himself! The perfection of his bearing on the
floor was no careful pose: it was due to the brimming overplus of
his happiness. Happiness is surely the best teacher of good
manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment. He was
young, remember; and this was his first job. His precocious
experience as a paterfamilias had added to his mien just that
suggestion of unconscious gravity which is so appealing to
ladies. He looked (they thought) as though he had been touched--
but Oh so lightly!--by poetic sorrow or strange experience: to
ask him the way to the notion counter was as much of an adventure
as to meet a reigning actor at a tea. The faint cloud of