Miss Theodora: a West End Story
Copyright© 2026 by Helen Leah Reed
Chapter 3
Ernest, himself, grew up without any social prejudices. His aunt often wondered at this, yet, like many sensible people, she did not try to impress him with her own views. As one by one the dwelling houses on Charles Street were changed into shops, he only rejoiced that Miss Theodora wouldn’t have to send so far for her groceries and provisions. But Miss Theodora drew the line here. She had always been able to go to the market every day, and no thrifty housewife needs a provision shop under her very nose, she said.
Her one exception in favor of neighborhood shopping was made for the little thread and needle shop on the corner below her house. Even a person who doesn’t have many new gowns occasionally needs tapes and needles, and may find it convenient to buy them near at hand.
This shop was a delight to Ernest, and in the days when his chin hardly reached the level of the counter, he loved to stand and gaze at the rows of jars filled with variegated sticks of candy, jaw-breakers and pickled limes; for the two maiden ladies who kept the shop sold many things besides needles and thread. In the little glass show-case, in addition to mittens and scissors and an occasional beautiful fan, and heaps of gay marbles, was a pile of highly-colored story books, “The Tale of Goody Two Shoes” and others of that ilk, and mysterious looking sheets of paper, which needed only the manipulation of skilful scissors to change them into life-like paper dolls with elaborate wardrobes. Ernest, of course, took little interest in the paper dolls, —he bought chiefly marbles; but his cousin, Kate Digby, whenever she was permitted to spend a day at the West End, was a devoted patron of the little shop, and saved all her pennies to increase her household of dolls. Indeed, she confided to Ernest that when she grew up she was going to have a shop just like the one kept by the Misses Bascom. If Mrs. Stuart Digby had heard her say this, she would have wondered where in the world her daughter had acquired a taste for anything so ordinary as trade.
A block or two away from the thread and needle shop was a shop that Miss Theodora abhorred. Within they sold every kind of thing calculated to draw the stray pennies from the pockets of the school children who passed it daily. Its windows, with their display of gaudy and vulgar illustrated papers, gave her positive pain. A generation ago ladies had not acquired the habit of rushing into print with every matter of reform; otherwise Miss Theodora might have sent a letter to the newspaper, signed “Prudentia,” or something of that kind, deploring the fact that a shop like this should be allowed to exist near a school, drawing pennies from the pockets of the school children, at the same time that it vitiated their artistic sense.
Ernest, as I have said, grew up without marked local or social prejudices. Many of his spare pennies went into the money drawer of the corner shop, and much of his spare time he spent with the workmen at the cabinet-makers’ near by. For little workshops were beginning to appear in the neighborhood of lower Charles Street, and some of their proprietors had cut away the front of an old house, in order to build a window to display their wares.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.