s native surroundings when you realize that any day it
may be carried _off_ and so exposed. Thus do shop-windows destroy
romance.

But in the humbler windows off the Avenue there is an equal, if
grosser, element of immorality. For these are the windows where
price-tags are displayed. The tag has always two prices, the higher
marked through with red ink, the lower, for this very reason, calling
with a siren voice. The price crossed off is always just beyond your
means, the other just within it. "Ah," you think, swallowing the
deception with only too great willingness, "what a bargain! It may
never come again!" And you enter the fatal door.

Perhaps you struggle first. "Don't buy it," says the inhibition of
prudence. "You have more neckties now than you can wear."

"But it's so cheap," says impulse, with the usual sophistry.

And you, poor victim that you are, tugged on and back by warring
factions in your brain,--poor refutation of the silly old theological
superstitions that there is such a thing as free will,--vacillate on
the sidewalk till the battle is over, till your mythical free will is
down in the dust. Thus do shop-windows overthrow theology.

Then you enter that shop, and ask for the tie. Or perhaps it is
something else, and they haven't your size. You ought to feel glad,
relieved. Do you? You do not! You are angry. You feel as if you had
lost just so much money, when in reality you have saved it. Thus do
shop-windows destroy logic.

This has been a particularly perilous season for the man with a
passion for shirts. By some diabolic agreement, all the haberdashers
at one and the same time filled their windows with luscious lavenders
and faint green stripes and soft silk shirts with comfortable French
cuffs, and marking out $2.00 or $3.00, as the case might be, wrote
$1.50 or $2.50 below. The song of the shirt was loud in the land, its
haunting melody not to be resisted. Is there any lure for a woman in
all the fluffy mystery of a January "white sale" comparable to the
seduction for a man of a lavender shirt marked down from $2.00 to
$1.50? I doubt it. Heaven help the woman if there is! So the unused
stock in trunk or bureau drawer accumulates, and the weekly reward for
patient toil at an office dribbles away, and the savings-bank is no
richer for your deposit--and the shop-windows flare as shamelessly as
ever. There is only one satisfaction. The man who sells shirts always
has a passion for jewelry. And