He moved about this gay store world with a sense of kingly superiority. He listened indulgently to the idle chatter of the shop girls, the rattle of the cash boxes, and smiled at the seriousness with which this business of selling was pressed. What a tremendous ado they made of living, with year after year, month after month, day after day, looming endlessly before them! Not an act which they performed, even to the tying up of a bundle, ended in itself, but was one of an endless vista of acts. The burden of the Future was upon them. They drooped, poor bloodless things, beneath the weight of the relentless days before them. And so this faded present was all their future, too. They saw nothing of the joyous world which spun around him bright as a new coin. They were dead, because of the weary days to come, to the magical brilliancy of the big arc-lights, to the humor and action of the crowd, to the quick shifts of colors; they were stupefied by this great flux of life which swept them on day after day to another day. Often unexpressed, this, but felt dumbly below the chatter and dry laughter. They waited, waited, circling about in a gray maelstrom until the grave sucked them in. He himself had been in the clutch of it. But that was yesterday. To-day he saw all that lay unseen before their dulled vision--all the show with its million actors. He saw for example the pathos in the patient eyes of the old lady yonder--still waiting at eighty; he caught the flash of scarlet ribbon beyond, the silent message of the black one (another long waiting); the muffled laugh and the muffled oath; the careless eyes that tossed the coin to the counter, the sharp eyes that followed it, the dead ones that picked it up and threw it into the nickeled cash box which flew with it to its golden nest; the tread, the tread, the tread of a thousand feet, the beat, beat, beat of a thousand hearts. All these things he saw and heard and felt. When he had fully replenished his wardrobe he still had several hours left to him. He remembered a unique book store just off Fifth Avenue at West Thirty-ninth Street which he had frequently passed, often lingering in front of the windows to admire quaint English prints. On cloudy days especially he had often made it a point to walk up there and breathe in the spirit of sunshine that he found in the green grass of the old hunting scenes and in the scarlet coats of the hearty-cheeked men riding to hounds upon their lean horses. "Come on," he called enthusiastically to Bobby. "We 've just begun." "Gee!" gasped Bobby. "H'aint you spent it all? Have yer gut more left?" "Lots. As much as I can spend until I die." The boy's face grew eager. "Say," he asked confidentially. "Where 'd yer git it?" "Earned it,--the most of it. Sweat for it and starved for it and suffered for it! And I earned with it the right to spend it, the _right_, I tell you!"