Unimaginable things had happened in the Square.  For Constance, the reputation of the Square was eternally ruined.  Charles Critchlow, by that strange good fortune which always put him in the right when fairly he ought to have been in the wrong, had let the Baines shop and his own shop and house to the Midland Clothiers Company, which was establishing branches throughout Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and adjacent counties.  He had sold his own chemist’s stock and gone to live in a little house at the bottom of Kingstreet.  It is doubtful whether he would have consented to retire had not Alderman Holl died earlier in the year, thus ending a long rivalry between the old men for the patriarchate of the Square.  Charles Critchlow was as free from sentiment as any man, but no man is quite free from it, and the ancient was in a position to indulge sentiment had he chosen.  His business was not a source of loss, and he could still trust his skinny hands and peering eyes to make up a prescription.  However, the offer of the Midland Clothiers Company tempted him, and as the undisputed ‘father’ of the Square he left the Square in triumph.

The Midland Clothiers Company had no sense of the proprieties of trade.  Their sole idea was to sell goods.  Having possessed themselves of one of the finest sites in a town which, after all was said and done, comprised nearly forty thousand inhabitants, they set about to make the best of that site.  They threw the two shops into one, and they caused to be constructed a sign compared to which the spacious old ‘Baines’ sign was a postcard.  They covered the entire frontage with posters of a theatrical description—­coloured posters!  They occupied the front page of the Signal, and from that pulpit they announced that winter was approaching, and that they meant to sell ten thousand overcoats at their new shop in Bursley at the price of twelve and sixpence each.  The tailoring of the world was loudly and coarsely defied to equal the value of those overcoats.  On the day of opening they arranged an orchestra or artillery of phonographs upon the leads over the window of that part of the shop which had been Mr. Critchlow’s.  They also carpeted the Square with handbills, and flew flags from their upper storeys.  The immense shop proved to be full of overcoats; overcoats were shown in all the three great windows; in one window an overcoat was disposed as a receptacle for water, to prove that the Midland twelve-and-sixpenny overcoats were impermeable by rain.  Overcoats flapped in the two doorways.  These devices woke and drew the town, and the town found itself received by bustling male assistants very energetic and rapid, instead of by demure anaemic virgins.  At moments towards evening the shop was populous with custom; the number of overcoats sold was prodigious.  On another day the Midland sold trousers in a like manner, but without the phonographs.  Unmistakably the Midland had shaken the Square and demonstrated that commerce was still possible to fearless enterprise.