"Pray do," said Holgrave, "and let me have the pleasure of being your first customer.
I am about taking a walk to the seashore before going to my rooms, where I misuse Heaven's blessed sunshine by tracing out human features through its agency.
A few of those biscuits, dipped in sea-water, will be just what I need for breakfast.
What is the price of half a dozen?"
"Let me be a lady a moment longer," replied Hepzibah, with a manner of antique stateliness, to which a melancholy smile lent a kind of grace.
She put the biscuits into his hand, but rejected the compensation.
"A Pyncheon must not, at all events, under her forefathers' roof, receive money for a morsel of bread, from her only friend!"
Holgrave took his departure, leaving her, for the moment, with spirits not quite so much depressed.
Soon, however, they had subsided nearly to their former dead level.
With a beating heart, she listened to the footsteps of early passengers, which now began to be frequent along the street.
Once or twice they seemed to linger; these strangers, or neighbors, as the case might be, were looking at the display of toys and pretty commodities in Hepzibah's shop-window.
She was doubly tortured; in part, with a sense of overwhelming shame, that strange and unloving eyes should have the privilege of gazing, and partly because the idea occurred to her, with ridiculous importunity, that the window was not arranged so skilfully, nor nearly to so much advantage, as it might have been.
It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of her shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles, or substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked. So she made the change, and straightway fancied that everything was spoiled by it; not recognising that it was the nervousness of the juncture, and her own native squeamishness, as an old maid, that wrought all the seeming mischief.
Anon, there was an encounter, just at the doorstep, betwixt two laboring men, as their rough voices denoted them to be.
After some slight talk about their own affairs, one of them chanced to notice the shop-window, and directed the other's attention to it.
"See here!" cried he; "what do you think of this?
Trade seems to be looking up in Pyncheon Street!"
"Well, well, this is a sight, to be sure!" exclaimed the other.
"In the old Pyncheon House, and underneath the Pyncheon Elm!
Who would have thought it?
Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a cent-shop!"
"Will she make it go, think you, Dixey?" said his friend.
"I don't call it a very good stand.
There's another shop just round the corner."
"Make it go!" cried Dixey, with a most contemptuous expression, as if the very idea were impossible to be conceived.
"Not a bit of it!
Why, her face—I've seen it, for I dug her garden for her one year—her face is enough to frighten the Old Nick himself, if he had ever so great a mind to trade with her.
People can't stand it, I tell you!
She scowls dreadfully, reason or none, out of pure ugliness of temper!"
"Well, that's not so much matter," remarked the other man. "These sour-tempered folks are most handy at business, and know pretty well what they are about.
But, as you say, I don't think she'll do much. This business of keeping cent-shops is overdone, like all other kinds of trade, handicraft, and bodily labor. I know it, to my cost!
My wife kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay!"
"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 analyse, 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 unpracticed 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, dry-goods 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 further 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 dusty old House of Seven Gables, with the antiquated shop-window under its projecting storey, 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 the 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!