culties, it wanted me--to be beautiful! I at least
feel and know that the people who were the brain, the daily moving
consciousness behind the face--wanted me to be a becoming customer to
them. They did not want to see me coming in, if it could possibly be
helped, in that hat any more!

* * * * *

I have told this little history of a gray hat, not because it is in any
way extraordinary, but because it is not. The same thing, or something
quite like it, expressing the same spirit, might have happened in any
one of the best hundred department stores in the world.

Most people can remember a time, only a very little while ago, when
clerks in our huge department stores or selling machines were not
expected to be people who would think of things like this to do, or who
would know how, or who would think to consider them good business if
they did.

The department store that based its success on selecting clerks of a
high order of human insight, that paid higher wages to its clerks for
their power of being believed in, for their personal qualities and their
shrewdness in helping people and a gift for discovering mutual interests
with everybody and for founding permanent human relations with the
public, had not been thought of a little while ago.

All that had been thought of was the appearance of these things. It was
an employer's business, speaking generally, to get all he could out of
his clerks and have them get as little as possible out of him. It was
their business in their turn to get as much money out of the public as
they could get, and to give the public as little in return as they
dared.

The type of employer who liked to do business in this way, and who
believed in it, crowed over the world nearly everywhere as the Practical
Man. And for the time being certainly it has to be admitted that he
seemed the most successful. Naturally there came to be a general
impression among the people that only certain lower orders of life and
character could be employed, or could stand being employed, in the great
department stores.

I used often to go into ----'s. Everybody remembers it. I went in, as a
rule, in a helpless, waiting, married way, and as a mere attache of the
truly wise and good. All I ever did or was expected to do was to stand
by and look wise and discriminating a minute about dress goods, when
spoken to. I used to put in my time looking behind the counters--all
those busy, pa