"Then you meet other couples and solitary people going about, each with a gloomy salesman leading. The run of them look uncomfortable; some are hot about the ears and in the spiteful phase of ill-temper; all look sick of the business except the raw new-comers. It's the only time they will ever select any furniture, their first chance and their last. Most of their selections are hurried a little. The salesman must not be kept all day.... Yet it goes hard with you if you buy your Object in Life and find it just a 'special line' made to sell.... We're all amateurs at living, just as we are all amateurs at furnishing--or dying. Some of the poor devils one meets carry tattered little scraps of paper, and fumble conscientiously with stumpy pencils. It's a comfort to see how you go, even if you do have to buy rubbish. 'If we have _this_ so good, dear, I don't know _how_ we shall manage in the kitchen,' says the careful housewife.... So it is we do our shopping in the Great Emporium." "You will have to rewrite your Ballade," said I, "and put all that in." "I wish I could," said the poet. "And while you were having these very fine moods?" "Annie and the shopman settled most of the furniture between them. Perhaps it's just as well. I was never very good at the practical details of life.... Cigarette's out! Have you any more matches?" "Horribly depressed you are!" I said. "There's to-morrow. Well, well...." And then he went off at a tangent to tell me what he expected to make by his next volume of poems, and so came to the congenial business of running down his contemporaries, and became again the cheerful little Poet that I know. THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS