I had found a department store that had absolutely identified itself with my interests, that could act about a hat the way a wife would--a department store that looked forward to a permanent relation with me--a great live machine that could be glad and sorry--that really took me in, knew how I felt about things, cared how I looked as I walked down the street. Sometimes I think of the poor, wounded, useless thing I took back to them, those pitiless holes punched in it--just where no one else would ever have had them. I am human. I always feel about the store, that great marble and glass Face, when I go by it now as if, in spite of all the difficulties, it wanted me--to be beautiful! I at least feel and know that the people who were the brain, the daily moving consciousness behind the face--wanted me to be a becoming customer to them. They did not want to see me coming in, if it could possibly be helped, in that hat any more! * * * * * I have told this little history of a gray hat, not because it is in any way extraordinary, but because it is not. The same thing, or something quite like it, expressing the same spirit, might have happened in any one of the best hundred department stores in the world. Most people can remember a time, only a very little while ago, when clerks in our huge department stores or selling machines were not expected to be people who would think of things like this to do, or who would know how, or who would think to consider them good business if they did. The department store that based its success on selecting clerks of a high order of human insight, that paid higher wages to its clerks for their power of being believed in, for their personal qualities and their shrewdness in helping people and a gift for discovering mutual interests with everybody and for founding permanent human relations with the public, had not been thought of a little while ago. All that had been thought of was the appearance of these things. It was an employer's business, speaking generally, to get all he could out of his clerks and have them get as little as possible out of him. It was their business in their turn to get as much money out of the public as they could get, and to give the public as little in return as they dared. The type of employer who liked to do business in this way, and who believed in it, crowed over the world nearly everywhere as the Practical Man. And for the time being certainly it has to be admitted that he seemed the most successful. Naturally there came to be a general impression among the people that only certain lower orders of life and character could be employed, or could stand being employed, in the great department stores.