In it there is always the apparatus of business--telephones and a roll-top desk full of billheads and ledgers and writing materials. That corner of the room is practical to a degree. But there are always, as well, several rocking-chairs with “tidies,” half a dozen dreary palms and ferns, a few pictures of a semi-devotional nature in somber frames, and, if it can possibly be managed, an imitation stained-glass window. The rocking-chairs, the tidies, the dusty green things, the pictures, the colored glass are there to “soften the blow,” to extend a kind of mute sympathy, to make you feel that your relations with the place are not entirely sordid and commercial. On a table there is literature, but lest it should strike in one’s affliction a false and jarring note, it is invariably confined to last year’s reports, bound in dark-gray paper, of the trustees of local cemeteries. To one’s intelligence it is all very insulting. So, also, was the manner of the abhorrent young man who presently appeared through a curtained doorway in the rear of the particular establishment I happened to be visiting. In the room beyond he had been whistling, as he approached, a popular two-step, but he instantly ceased when he saw me and unconsciously drawing his face into a wan, smitten smile, came forward noiselessly, almost on tiptoe. He would have shaken hands with a slight, prolonged pressure full of regret and comprehension if I had let him, but I saw it coming and putting my hand in my pocket allowed his to drop back with a sad gesture that sought to say: “Yes--yes, I understand.” “I should like to look at coffins,” I remarked, and then coldly eyed his discomfiture. For it was clearly not the sort of beginning he had expected. I had been prosaic and unmoved, and the fact left him for a moment with his trained sympathy, his professional manner, on his hands so to speak. He didn’t exactly know what to do with it, and he couldn’t quite bring himself, all at once, to risk anything else. In the meantime I merely looked at him. “Mr. Murksom” (Mr. Murksom was the proprietor; they always have names like that) “has stepped out for a few minutes, but he’s coming right back,” the young man at last explained in tones that tried to be commonplace like my own. But I could see how difficult it was for him to _be_ commonplace under the circumstances. Separated from its traditional and odious technique, the pursuit of his vocation plainly seemed to him neither legitimate nor altogether decent. “Mr. Murksom is very helpful,” he added in a refined whisper, delicately averting his eyes. He had relapsed again into the “manner”; he just couldn’t help it. It was as if he had said: “Even if for some perverse reason _you_ refuse to act your part, it will never be said of me that I have failed in mine.”