The Poet and the Emporium

"I am beginning life," he said, with a sigh. "Great Heavens! I have
spent a day--_a day!_--in a shop. Three bedroom suites and a sideboard
are among the unanticipated pledges of our affection. Have you lithia?
For a man of twelve limited editions this has been a terrible day."

I saw to his creature comforts. His tie was hanging outside his
waistcoat, and his complexion was like white pasteboard that has got
wet. "Courage," said I. "It will not occur again----"

"It will," said he. "We have to get there again tomorrow. We have--what
is it?--carpets, curtains----"

He produced his tablets. I was amazed. Those receptacles of choice
thoughts!

"The amber sunlight splashing through the leaky--leafy interlacing
green," he read. "No!--that's not it. Ah, here! Curtains!
Drawing-room--not to cost more than thirty shillings! And there's all
the Kitchen Hardware! (Thanks.) Dining-room chairs--query--rush bottoms?
What's this? G.L.I.S.--ah! "Glistering thro' deeps of
glaucophane"--that's nothing. Mem. to see can we afford Indian
needlework chairs--57s. 6d.? It's dreadful, Bellows!"

He helped himself to a cigarette.

"Find the salesman pleasant?" said I.

"Delightful. Assumed I was a spendthrift millionaire at first. Produced
in an off-hand way an eighty-guinea bedroom suite--we're trying to do
the entire business, you know, on about two hundred pounds. Well--that's
ten editions, you know. Came down, with evidently dwindling respect, to
things that were still ruinously expensive. I told him we wanted an
idyll--love in a cottage, and all that kind of thing. He brushed that on
one side, said idols were upstairs in the Japanese Department, and that
perhaps we might _do_ with a servant's set of bedroom furniture. Do with
a set! He was a gloomy man with (I should judge) some internal pain. I
tried to tell him that there was quite a lot of middle-class people like
myself in the country, people of limited or precarious means, whose
existence he seemed to ignore; assured him some of them led quite
beautiful lives. But he had no ideas beyond wardrobes. I quite forgot
the business of shopping in an attempt to kindle a little human
enthusiasm in his heart. We were in a great vast place full of
wardrobes, with a remote glittering vista of brass bedsteads--skeleton
beds, you know--and I tried to inspire him with some of the poetry of
his emporium; tried to make him imagine these beds and things going east
and west, north and south, to take sorrow, servitude, joy, worry,
failing strength, restless ambition in their impartial embraces. He only
turned round to Annie, and asked her if she thought she could