"She said something of the kind to me," he admitted. "She was unreasonable--very. What could she expect of six dollars?" The handsome saleswoman at the dolls' furniture counter was intoning, "Oh, Mr. Rose! Oh, Mr. Rose!" with increasing petulance, and the floor-walker sped to her, leaving his cryptic utterance unexplained. Jean asked a fellow-clerk more about her predecessor, and learned that as she lived somewhere in the Bronx, both carfare and lunches had been serious items. These, fortunately, she herself need not consider. It was half the battle to feel permanent. She could shift somehow on her present wage till promotion came. There was, moreover, a certain compensation in feeling herself a factor in this great establishment which everybody knew who had heard of New York at all. It was a show place of the metropolis, one of the seventy times seven wonders of the New World. Its floor space was reckoned in acres, its roof housed a whole city block, its capital represented millions, its wares the habitable globe. Nothing essential to human life seemed to be lacking. There were scales for your exalted babyship's earthly advent; patent foods, healing drugs, mechanical playthings for your childish wants or ills; text-books for your growing mind; fine feathers for your expanding social wings; the trousseau for your marriage; furnishings from cellar to attic for your first housekeeping; a bank for your savings; fittings for your office; the postal service, the telegraph, the telephone, lest business suffer while you shop; bronzes, carvings, automobiles, steam yachts, old wines, old books, old masters for your topping prosperity; comforts innumerable--oculists, dentists, discreet photographers, what not--for your lean and slippered decline; and, yes, even the sad few vanities you may take with you to your quiet grave. It drew rich and poor alike these days, and sooner or later the toy department gathered them in. Though Stella came not, there were many of familiar aspect who did. Hardly a day passed without its greeting from some one Jean knew. Mrs. St. Aubyn came shopping on account of an incredible grandchild she must remember; the bookworm for the cogent reason that a cherubic niece brought him; the birds of passage to celebrate an engagement obtained at last; the shorn lambs of Wall Street to revive fading memories of a full pocketbook; the stenographer and the manicure since they were women; the dentist because of Jean. It was impossible to mistake Paul's reason. Her fellow-clerks hinted it, Mr. Rose reënforced their opinion with his own, Amy added embroidered comment, and finally Paul told her explicitly himself. On the first evening, when he appeared at her counter near the closing hour, he bought a game. At his second call, a week later, he examined at length, but did not purchase. The third time he said that he had happened by; the fourth he cast subterfuge to the winds and avowed frankly that he came to walk home with her.