"There's a way you get into," he told me, "of serving them carefully, and
I hope, politely, without stopping your own thinking. I've been reading
Christie's _New Commercial Plants_ all this autumn, and that needs keeping
your mind on it, I can tell you. So long as it isn't a prescription, of
course, I can carry as much as half a page of Christie in my head, and at
the same time I could sell out all that window twice over, and not a penny
wrong at the end. As to prescriptions, I think I could make up the general
run of 'em in my sleep, almost."
For reasons of my own, I was deeply interested in Marconi experiments at
their outset in England; and it was of a piece with Mr. Cashell's
unvarying thoughtfulness that, when his nephew the electrician
appropriated the house for a long-range installation, he should, as I have
said, invite me to see the result.
The old lady went away with her medicine, and Mr. Shaynor and I stamped on
the tiled floor behind the counter to keep ourselves warm. The shop, by
the light of the many electrics, looked like a Paris-diamond mine, for Mr.
Cashell believed in all the ritual of his craft. Three superb glass jars--
red, green, and blue--of the sort that led Rosamund to parting with her
shoes--blazed in the broad plate-glass windows, and there was a confused
smell of orris, Kodak films, vulcanite, tooth-powder, sachets, and almond-
cream in the air.
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