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At No. 7 Vernor Street, somewhere between Piccadilly and Pall Mall, Mrs Sarah Greenwood kept a tobacco shop.

No. 7 was a flat-faced London house, stuccoed and painted cream, its window-sashes and sills a dull chocolate, and its private door to the right of the shop of the same colour as the window-frames. The shop was small but double fronted, with a glass door in the middle. Upon a black fascia board was painted in letters of gold, “S. Greenwood, Cigar Merchant.”

Mrs Greenwood and her two daughters, Corah and Kitty, lived above the shop.

Vernor Street had a faded and mellow distinction of its own, a lingering flavour as of Parma violets and pomaded heads. It suggested the hansom-cab and the silk hat, and had a Sedan chair appeared in it on some dim evening the windows of Vernor Street might have expressed no surprise. Mayfair, or the male part of Mayfair, still shopped here at old establishments that had known the “Georges”, and in the planting of herself in Vernor Street Mrs Sarah Greenwood had accepted risks and shown great good sense. She was a doctor’s widow. Her husband, who had practised within shouting distance of the Whitechapel Road, and who had been what has been called a “Sixpenny Healer”, had died suddenly of pneumonia some seven years before the war, leaving his widow with some £800 in Colonial stock, and two young daughters. Hence, the adventure of No. 7 Vernor Street, and the insinuating of a little, solid, courageous body between a military bootmaker’s and a military tailor’s. Mrs Sarah, shrewdly daring, had come and seen and conquered. She had realized the power of a personality. She had fitted herself into Vernor Street as nicely as a nut into its shell.

For Vernor Street still eschewed cheapness. It had a certain distinguished, shabby rightness; it was in the midst of “club-land”; it gave scope for the persuasions of a personality. It did not glitter; it did not co-operate; it did not pile itself to the skies and fly the flags of half the nations, and advertise itself as a sort of cosmopolitan truck-shop. It was English and individual, and in Vernor Street there was no more individual person than Mrs Sarah. She had a reputation, and two pretty daughters.

For, in coming to Vernor Street Mrs Sarah Greenwood had realized that the mere selling of cigars and pipes and cigarettes was but a part of the business; what mattered was how and to whom you sold them. She knew how to strike the right note, or what was still better—to strike no note at all. Hence, the shop window of No. 7 Vernor Street had neither too much in it nor too little—and what was there was of the best. It could be called a gentleman’s window, containing a selection of cigar boxes, cedar-wood cabinets, a dozen or so briar pipes of the highest quality, a few boxes of cigarettes. For Mrs Sarah had arrived at that position when she did not need to rely upon her shop window. She was a person. It would be no exaggeration to say that quite thirty per cent. of the officers who had gone out with the Expeditionary Force in 1914 had known Mrs Sarah Greenwood.

And with the coming of the great war Mrs Sarah had become a still more notable and successful woman. She had sold cigars and given of her wisdom and her humour to the old army, and in the nature of things her name had become known to the new. She was a great little woman, a piece of old England. Officers home on leave came to meet and to sit in the red divan behind the shop, brass hats, red hats, blue hats, plain second lieutenants, guardsmen, riflemen, gunners, cavalry-men. She was a cheerful person to visit. She understood men. She had such vitality. You had only to look at those roguish dark eyes in the round face with its broad blunt nose that had a way of wrinkling itself up, to feel—somehow—that life was a great business.

As some old warrior put it—“She fills you up.”

She had such a heart in her. She stood about five feet high, and her hair was as black as a crow’s back. Her mouth was big and red and expressive. She had the kindest and the shrewdest of tongues, and a fine sense of humour. She could flatter and she could scold, but there was not a shred of the shrew in her.

“Business is business—.”

It was. She was doing big business. How often were the words spoken in overseas messes—“O,—you can get them at Sarah’s,—Vernor Street—you know.” The army mail-bags carried her packets into all sorts of odd places, French and Flemish farmhouses, dug-outs, head-quarter messes. Women came to No. 7 Vernor Street, wives, sisters, and others. “I want to send some cigars out.—” Yes,—through all those years Mrs Sarah and her daughters had been kept very busy.

She was a solid woman, and nowhere else had her solidity expressed itself more fundamentally than in the bringing up of her daughters.

Her text had been “No Nonsense”. She had sent them both to goodish schools, and had yet contrived to keep them soundly hers. They had a share in the business, and though comely young women they shared their mother’s sense and solidity. Adoration was not a word much used in the Greenwood vocabulary, but Mrs Sarah had deserved and been given something that was better than adoration.