The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (9.1896)

2o6

A Guardian of the Poor

customers, on a triumphant withdrawal of weft by Mr. Borlase,
had been deeply explored by the mercers who supplied him ;
for the acts of Parliament which forbid adulteration do not
apply to wares otherwise than edible, and the later statute against
fraudulent misdescription is beneficently evasible, as having no
particular officer to set it in motion. Thus, “full-fashioned”
stockings, owing their form to judicious blocking after manufac-
ture, and double-width calicoes at four pence three farthings,
which yield on agitation a rich dressing of clay-like powder,
are quite securely vendible, without danger to the repute of the
retailer as a pillar of society and a local vestryman.

Since you cannot be a vestryman and a guardian of the poor,
even in the suburbs, for nothing, it is to be gathered that Mr.
Borlase—the sole constituent of Borlase and Company—went not
unrewarded, even in this world’s corruptible profit, for the benefits
which he bestowed on society. It was his pride to be referred to
as the cheapest draper in the neighbourhood. You could purchase
at his shop, on astonishingly economical terms, goods which only
a very acute and highly trained perception could distinguish at
sight from others, which, in less favoured markets, were priced at
twice those rates, an advantage secured by the frequent confer-
ences of Borlase and Company with hungry looking German
wholesalers in Jewin Street and other recondite thoroughfares of
the E.C. district.

The purchasing capacity in the individual, among Mr. Borlase’s
clientage, being small, it follows that the number of his trans-
actions, to be lucrative, must be also large. Hence the sixty-odd
“young people” (“who,” as a local paper worded it “ constituted
the personnel of Messrs. Borlase and Co’s staff”) had all their work
cut out for them on a Saturday night. But practice, and the
consciousness that lapse or error entailed fines not conveniently

spared