s to discuss
life insurance, or did we come over here to buy model garments and get
through with it, because believe me, it is no pleasure for me to stick
around a country where you couldn't get no sugar or butter in a hotel,
not if you was to show the head waiter a doctor's certificate with a
hundred-dollar bill pinned on it. So let us go round to a few of these
high-grade dressmakers and see how much we are going to get stuck for,
and have it over with."

Accordingly, they paid for the coffee and milk without sugar and the
dark sour rolls without butter which nowadays form the usual hotel
breakfast in France, and set out for the office of the commission
agent whose place of business is the rendezvous for American
garment-manufacturers in search of Parisian model gowns. The broad
avenues in the vicinity of the hotel seemed unusually crowded even to
people as accustomed to the congested traffic of lower Fifth Avenue as
Abe and Morris were, but as they proceeded toward the wholesale district
of Paris the streets became less and less traveled, until at length they
walked along practically deserted thoroughfares.

"And we thought business was rotten in America," Morris said. "Why,
there ain't hardly one store open, hardly."

Abe nodded gloomily.

"It looks to me, Mawruss, that if there is any new garments being
designed over here," he said, "they would be quiet morning gowns
appropriate for attending something informal like a sale by a receiver
in supplementary proceedings, or a more or less elaborate afternoon
costume, not too showy, y'understand, but the kind of model that a
fashionable Paris dressmaker could wear to a referee in bankruptcy's
office so as not to make the attending creditors say she was her own
best customer, understand me."

"Well, what could you expect?" Morris said, as they toiled up the stairs
to the commission agent's office. "The chances is that up to a couple of
months ago, in a Paris dressmaker's shop, a customer arrived only every
other week, whereas a nine-inch bomb arrived every twenty minutes, and
furthermore, Abe, it was _you_ that suggested this trip, not _me_, so
now that we are over here, we should ought to make the best of it, and
if this here commission agent can't show us no new designs, he could,
anyhow, show us the sights."

But even this consolation was denied them, for when they reached the
commission agent's door it was locked and barred, as were all the other
offices on th