It was now so near Christmas that in the department devoted to toys
and games you could not have placed a sheet of foreign notepaper
between mothers (with a sprinkling of aunts and grandmas) unless you
wanted it torn to pieces before you could count "One!" Children were
massed together in a thick, low-growing underbrush, and of their
species only babies were able to rise, like cream, to the top. The
air, or rather the atmosphere (since all the air had been breathed
long ago), was to the nerves what tow is to fire. Nobody could be in
it for ten minutes without wanting to hit somebody else or push
somebody else's child, little brute! out of the way.
What with heat, the rage for buying, impatience to get in and
impatience to get out, the fragrance of pine and holly decorations,
the smell of hot varnish and hot people and cheap furs, the babble of
excited voices and shrieks of exhausted children, it was the true
Christmas spirit. Peter Rolls's store in general, and the toy
department in particular, were having what would be alluded to later
in advertisements as an "unprecedented success."
Before Win came the folding chairs for "assistants" had all been
broken or out of order.
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