"I'm interested in what's in your suitcase." The peddler stood aside after making a flourish with his plump hands. Haze hung over the enormous suitcase like dense smoke. "But I can't see anything," Mary-Jean protested as her curiosity got the better of her fright. "Naturally you can't. Until you make your selection. You want something unusual, something unexpected to happen. You want to be lifted out of your humdrum life and given adventure, romance, a fling at the exotic and the improbable, an--" "These are the things you sell?" Mary-Jean asked in disbelief. "To women. Only to women such as yourself." It was still a sales pitch, Mary-Jean told herself. An elaborate one, to be sure, but presently the peddler would come down to earth with the offer of some specific product, perhaps a beauty cream or perfume. Still, she had to admit that the strange haze over the open suitcase certainly was effective. "What do you charge for selling--for selling a fling at the exotic, as you say?" The peddler laughed. It was a birdlike sound, a chirping, twittering laugh. "Oh, no, my dear," he said, rocking with his laughter, "you don't understand. You've already paid." "I already paid?" "All your life, for every day of your life, you have paid. Every day you accepted the mundane and the humdrum, you have paid. You have paid a thousand times over." "You mean I get this--this whatever it is you're selling--free of charge?" "Very well. Call it that if you want. But shall we get down to business? I sell happiness. I sell happiness in the form of personal adornment." * * * * * Here it comes, Mary-Jean told herself. Personal adornment. Cosmetics? Jewelry? The pitch was coming down to earth. "Personal adornments," the peddler went on, "to change your life, to remove it from the sphere of the humdrum, to--" "Oh, for heaven's sake, come to the point," Mary-Jean snapped irritably. She did not want to admit that she was disappointed because the peddler seemed to be coming out of the clouds of her pipe-dreams and down to earth. "Personal adornments," the peddler went on, unconcerned, "which each and every still-young housewife, every victim of the mundane and prosaic, craves. For example, if I were to ask you what personal adornment, either general or specific, you craved the most, what would be your answer?"