the shame of hopes which had held nothing to support
defeat. He would have liked to confess his shame and own the justice
of his punishment to Margaret Green, but she seemed the only friend
who never came near. Other friends came, and many strangers, the
friends to look and the strangers to buy. He had no reason to
complain of his sales; the fame of his critical bookstore might have
ceased in New York, because it had gone abroad to Chicago and St.
Louis and Pittsburg; people who were clearly from these commercial
capitals and others came and bought copiously of his criticized stock,
and they praised the notion of it in telling him that he ought to open
branches in their several cities.

They were all women, and it was nearly all women who frequented the
Critical Bookstore, but in their multitude Margaret Green was not. He
thought it the greater pity because she would have enjoyed many of
them with him, and would have divined such as hoped the culture
implicated by a critical bookstore would come off on them without
great effort of their own; she would have known the sincere spirits,
too, and could have helped direct their choice of the best where all
was so good. He smiled to find that he was invoking her help, which he
had no right to.

His longing had no effect upon her till deep in January, when the
weather was engaged late one afternoon in keeping the promise of a
January thaw in the form of the worst snow-storm of the winter. Then
she came thumping with her umbrella-handle at his door as if, he
divined, she were too stiff-handed or too package-laden to press the
latch and let herself in, and she almost fell in, but saved herself
by spilling on the floor some canvases and other things which she had
been getting at the artist's-materials store near by. "Don't bother
about them," she said, "but take me to the fire as fast as you can,"
and when she had turned from snow to rain and had dripped partially
dry before the Franklin stove, she asked, "Where have you been all the
time?"

"Waiting here for you," he answered.

"Well, you needn't. I wasn't going to come--or at least not till you
sent for me, or said you wanted my advice."

"I don't want your advice now."

"I didn't come to give it. I just dropped in because if I hadn't I
should have just dropped outside. How have you been getting along with
your ridiculous critical bookstore?"

"Well, things are rather quiet with us just now, as the publishers say
to t