"Poor business!" responded Dixey, in a tone as if he were shaking his
head,--"poor business."
For some reason or other, not very easy to analyze, there had hardly
been so bitter a pang in all her previous misery about the matter as
what thrilled Hepzibah's heart on overhearing the above conversation.
The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully important; it
seemed to hold up her image wholly relieved from the false light of her
self-partialities, and so hideous that she dared not look at it. She
was absurdly hurt, moreover, by the slight and idle effect that her
setting up shop--an event of such breathless interest to
herself--appeared to have upon the public, of which these two men were
the nearest representatives. A glance; a passing word or two; a coarse
laugh; and she was doubtless forgotten before they turned the corner.
They cared nothing for her dignity, and just as little for her
degradation. Then, also, the augury of ill-success, uttered from the
sure wisdom of experience, fell upon her half-dead hope like a clod
into a grave. The man's wife had already tried the same experiment,
and failed! How could the born lady--the recluse of half a lifetime,
utterly unpractised in the world, at sixty years of age,--how could she
ever dream of succeeding, when the hard, vulgar, keen, busy, hackneyed
New England woman had lost five dollars on her little outlay! Success
presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild
hallucination.
Some malevolent spirit, doing his utmost to drive Hepzibah mad,
unrolled before her imagination a kind of panorama, representing the
great thoroughfare of a city all astir with customers. So many and so
magnificent shops as there were! Groceries, toy-shops, drygoods stores,
with their immense panes of plate-glass, their gorgeous fixtures, their
vast and complete assortments of merchandise, in which fortunes had
been invested; and those noble mirrors at the farther end of each
establishment, doubling all this wealth by a brightly burnished vista
of unrealities! On one side of the street this splendid bazaar, with a
multitude of perfumed and glossy salesmen, smirking, smiling, bowing,
and measuring out the goods. On the other, the dusky old House of the
Seven Gables, with the antiquated shop-window under its projecting
story, and Hepzibah herself, in a gown of rusty black silk, behind the
counter, scowling at the world as it went by! This mighty contrast
thrust itself forward as a fair expression of the odds against which
she was to begin her struggle for a subsistence. Success?
Preposterous! She would never think of it again! The house might just
as well be buried in an eternal fog while all other houses had the
sunshine on them; for not a foot would ever cross the threshold, nor a
hand so much as try the door!