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the tension under which these badly fed, poorly housed, bored and
bothered neighbours lived, made it inevitable. The mere fact that Mr.
Polly had to see them every day, that there was no getting away from
them, was in itself sufficient to make them almost unendurable to his
frettingly active mind.
Among other shopkeepers in the High Street there was Chuffles, the
grocer, a small, hairy, silently intent polygamist, who was given
rough music by the youth of the neighbourhood because of a scandal
about his wife's sister, and who was nevertheless totally
uninteresting, and Tonks, the second grocer, an old man with an older,
very enfeebled wife, both submerged by piety. Tonks went bankrupt, and
was succeeded by a branch of the National Provision Company, with a
young manager exactly like a fox, except that he barked. The toy and
sweetstuff shop was kept by an old woman of repellent manners, and so
was the little fish shop at the end of the street. The Berlin-wool
shop having gone bankrupt, became a newspaper shop, then fell to a
haberdasher in consumption, and finally to a stationer; the three
shops at the end of the street wallowed in and out of insolvency in
the hands of a bicycle repairer and dealer, a gramaphone dealer, a
tobacconist, a sixpenny-halfpenny bazaar-keeper, a shoemaker, a
greengrocer, and the exploiter of a cinematograph peep-show--but none
of them supplied friendship to Mr. Polly.
These adventurers in commerce were all more or less distraught souls,
driving without intelligible comment before the gale of fate. The two
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