o hard, Peter; we've always got along somehow,
and nobody in Bloombury is very rich."

Peter turned that over in his mind the whole of a raw and sleety
February. And one day when nobody came into the store from ten till
four, and loose winds went in a pack about the village streets, casting
up dry, icy dust where now and then some sharp muzzle reared out of the
press as they turned the corners, he spoke to Mr. Greenslet about it. It
was so cold that day that neither the red apples in the barrels nor the
crimson cranberries nor the yellowing hams on the rafters could
contribute any appearance of warmth to the interior of the grocery. A
kind of icy varnish of cold overlaid the gay lables of the canned
goods; the remnants of red and blue tartan exposed for sale looked
coarse-grained with the cold, and cold slips of ribbons clung to the
glass of the cases like the tongues of children tipped to the frosted
panes. Even the super-heated stove took on a purplish tinge of
chilblains, roughed by the wind.

A kind of arctic stillness pervaded the place, out of which the two men
hailed each other at intervals as from immeasurable deeps of space.

"Mr. Greenslet," ventured Peter at last, "are you a rich man?"

"Not by a long sight."

"Why?" questioned Peter.

"Not built that way."

The grocer lapsed back into the silence and seemed to lean against it
meditatively. The wolf wind howled about the corners and cast snow like
powdered glass upon the windows contemptuously, and time went by with a
large deliberate movement like a fat man turning over, before Peter
hailed again.

"Did you ever want to be?"

Mr. Greenslet reached out for the damper of the stove ostensibly to
shake down the ashes, but really to pull himself up out of the soundless
spaces of thought.

"When I was your age, yes. Thought I was going to be." The shaking of
the damper seemed to loosen the springs of speech in him. "I was up in
the city working for Siegel Brothers; began as a bundle boy and meant to
be one of the partners. But by the time I worked up to fancy goods I
realized that I would have to be as old as Methuselah to make it at that
rate. And Mrs. Greenslet didn't like the city; she was a Bloombury girl.
It wasn't any place for the children."

"So you came back?"

"We had saved a little. I bought out this place and put in a few notions
I'd got from Siegel's. I'm comfortably off, but I'm not rich."

"Would you like to be?"

"I don' know, I