By two o'clock, however, practically the entire selling force at least is back again. The hardest portion of the day begins. For, no matter how hard the store may advertise, no matter how it may strive to educate its patrons in every other way to the use of its facilities in the less crowded and hence more comfortable morning hours, the hard and solemn fact remains that it suits the comfort and convenience of the average New York woman to shop in the afternoon. And shop in the afternoon she does. She comes into Macy's right after luncheon--although a single glance at the big and crowded restaurant would easily convince you that she often lunches as well as shops in the big red-brick institution of Herald Square--and then gets right down to the serious business of shopping. And at Macy's it _is_ business; always business. The big store at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, in recent years at least, has not gone in for shows--for organ and orchestral concerts or recitals or anything of that sort. It has considered that its best shows are always upon its counters. It has had no quarrel with the successful stores that have added entertainment features to the other routine of their operations. It merely has contended that its own method was completely satisfactory to itself. Which, after all, is a position of infinite strength. "Macy's attractions are its prices!" is an advertising slogan of the house so long sounded now that it has become almost a household phrase to its hundreds of thousands of regular patrons. It is a phrase up to which it has lived, steadily and consistently. And not only has it steadfastly refused to give shows of any sort--save, of course, those wonderful window pageants of other years, which were horses of quite a different color indeed--but it has also refused up to the present time to install such non-merchandise enterprises as manicuring parlors, hair-dressing rooms, barber shops and the like. And this despite the fact that in selling such things as groceries and automobile sundries--to take two specific instances out of several--it has gone considerably beyond the merchandise scope of some of the very largest of its New York competitors. "Hundreds of thousands of regular patrons?" you interrupt and repeat. "A hundred thousand people is a whole lot. Until very recently, at least, the population of what would be considered a pretty good-sized American city."