ABSTRACT
If clothes had the virtues sometimes attributed to them in fairy stories, the Jury in Lady Harberton’s case should get into ‘rationals’ at once. They have upheld the landlady of a village inn in her refusal to give Lady Harberton the ordinary coffee-room accommodation, because she were a costume of this kind. The landlady gave the alternative of the bar parlour. But as soon as the luckless wayfarer saw this place, with its group of smokers in their shirt-sleeves; above all, as soon as she smelt it, she claimed the ordinary traveller’s right to the coffee room. The landlady was still obdurate – hence these proceedings. The landlady did not actually refuse food to her customer; she only insisted on serving it in a room in which it was unsuitable. The legal obligation, as the Chairman of Quarter Sessions explained, is to serve in a fit and reasonable place. The defence admitted that a coal-cellar, 1 for example, would not be such a place. The question is whether such a room as the one described is much better, in cases where a better room of general resort exists. The ordinary right of the well-conducted traveller of the better class is to the coffee room. Was this right refused to Lady Harberton on sufficient grounds? It was not a question of decency, either in dress or deportment; it was, as the defence admitted, only a question of taste on the landlady’s part. Ought that lady’s taste to be allowed to stand between a traveller and a meal – for, in the circumstances, this is what it comes to – in any house of common entertainment? Poor Lady Harberton’s ‘I have never yet heard of a respectable woman spending any time in a bar parlour,’ really goes to the root of the matter on this point. For, after all, which of the two involves the graver breach of taste – Lady Harberton in rationals, or Lady Harberton in what is virtually a taproom? The squeamish landlady really jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, in her zeal for the proprieties. Nothing could exceed the completeness with which she gave away her own case. She finally admitted that Lady Harberton and her followers were without reproach, and owned that her real object was the exclusion of ‘a class of persons in skin-tight knickerbockers who frequent the Portsmouth road.’ It comes to this, then, that a decently attired person was taken into the barparlour to keep the indecently-attired ones out of the house. /338
