The proprietors were decorously pompous, the shopmen superciliously polite.

They could not be more so if they had belonged to the State, and been paid by a public which they benefited and despised.

The ladies of Low Town (as the city subjacent to the Hill had been styled from a date remote in the feudal ages) entered those shops with a certain awe, and left them with a certain pride.

There they had learned what the Hill approved; there they had bought what the Hill had purchased.

It is much in this life to be quite sure that we are in the right, whatever that conviction may cost us.