fully for a few minutes to see if I could not look
more intelligent in the hat, I returned to the store firmly. I had made
up my mind that I would keep from looking the way that that hat made me
look, at any cost. The store was not responsible according to the letter
either for the hat or for the way I looked in it. I had deliberately
chosen it, looked at myself in cold blood in it, had those dreadful,
irremovable, eternal air-holes dug into it. I would buy a new one. I
jumped into a cab, and a moment after I arrived I found myself before
the clerk from whom I had bought it, with a new one on my head, and was
just reaching into my pocket for my purse when, to my astonishment, I
heard, or seemed to hear, the great Department Store Itself, in the
gentle accents of a young man with a yellow moustache, saying: "I'm
sorry"--all seven storys of it gathering itself up softly, apparently,
and saying "I'm sorry!" The young man explained that he was afraid the
hat was wrong the day before, and thought he ought to have told me so,
that the store would not want me to pay for the mistake.

I came home a changed man. I had been hit by the Golden Rule before in
department stores, but always rather subtly--never with such a broad,
beautiful flourish! I made some faint acknowledgment, I have forgotten
what, and rushed out of the store.

But I have never gone past the store since, on a 'bus, or in a taxi, or
sliding through the walkers on the street, but I have looked up to
it--to its big, quiet windows, its broad, honest pillars fronting a
world.

I take off my hat to it.

But it gave me more than a hat.

I think what a thousand department stores, stationed in a thousand
places on this old planet, could do in touching the imagination of the
world--every day, day by day, cityfuls at a time.

I had found a department store that had absolutely identified itself
with my interests, that could act about a hat the way a wife would--a
department store that looked forward to a permanent relation with me--a
great live machine that could be glad and sorry--that really took me in,
knew how I felt about things, cared how I looked as I walked down the
street. Sometimes I think of the poor, wounded, useless thing I took
back to them, those pitiless holes punched in it--just where no one
else would ever have had them. I am human. I always feel about the
store, that great marble and glass Face, when I go by it now as if, in
spite of all the diffi