When Freddy paid a visit to Earlscourt (which he never did when he
could possibly help it) to make the desolating announcement that he and
his Eliza were thinking of blackening the Largelady scutcheon by
opening a shop, he found the little household already convulsed by a
prior announcement from Clara that she also was going to work in an old
furniture shop in Dover Street, which had been started by a fellow
Wellsian. This appointment Clara owed, after all, to her old social
accomplishment of Push. She had made up her mind that, cost what it
might, she would see Mr. Wells in the flesh; and she had achieved her
end at a garden party. She had better luck than so rash an enterprise
deserved. Mr. Wells came up to her expectations. Age had not withered
him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half an hour. His
pleasant neatness and compactness, his small hands and feet, his
teeming ready brain, his unaffected accessibility, and a certain fine
apprehensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from his topmost hair
to his tipmost toe, proved irresistible. Clara talked of nothing else
for weeks and weeks afterwards. And as she happened to talk to the lady
of the furniture shop, and that lady also desired above all things to
know Mr. Wells and sell pretty things to him, she offered Clara a job
on the chance of achieving that end through her.
And so it came about that Eliza's luck held, and the expected
opposition to the flower shop melted away. The shop is in the arcade of
a railway station not very far from the Victoria and Albert Museum; and
if you live in that neighborhood you may go there any day and buy a
buttonhole from Eliza.
Now here is a last opportunity for romance. Would you not like to be
assured that the shop was an immense success, thanks to Eliza's charms
and her early business experience in Covent Garden? Alas! the truth is
the truth: the shop did not pay for a long time, simply because Eliza
and her Freddy did not know how to keep it. True, Eliza had not to
begin at the very beginning: she knew the names and prices of the
cheaper flowers; and her elation was unbounded when she found that
Freddy, like all youths educated at cheap, pretentious, and thoroughly
inefficient schools, knew a little Latin. It was very little, but
enough to make him appear to her a Porson or Bentley, and to put him at
his ease with botanical nomenclature. Unfortunately he knew nothing
else; and Eliza, though she could count money up to eighteen shillings
or so, and had acquired a certain familiarity with the language of
Milton from her struggles to qualify herself for winning Higgins's bet,
could not write out a bill without utterly disgracing the
establishment. Freddy's power of stating in Latin that Balbus built a
wall and that Gaul was divided into three parts did not carry with it
the slightest knowledge of accounts or business: Colonel Pickering had
to explain to him what a cheque book and a bank account meant. And the
pair were by no means easily teachable. Freddy backed up Eliza in her
obstinate refusal to believe that they could save money by engaging a
bookkeeper with some knowledge of the business. How, they argued, could
you possibly save money by going to extra expense when you already
could not make both ends meet? But the Colonel, after making the ends
meet over and over again, at last gently insisted; and Eliza, humbled
to the dust by having to beg from him so often, and stung by the
uproarious derision of Higgins, to whom the notion of Freddy succeeding
at anything was a joke that never palled, grasped the fact that
business, like phonetics, has to be learned.