he clearing
behind the station crammed with purchases from the Sears-Roebuck
wonderbook. Anyway, he would make another note of it. What would it be
like, he wondered, to have a million dollars to spend, and unlimited
access to the Sears-Roebuck treasures. Picturing himself as such a
Croesus, he innocently thought that his first act would be to take train
for Chicago and inspect the warehoused accumulations of those princes of
trade with his own eager eyes!

He mused humorously for a moment over a book on "Ease in Conversation."
("No trouble about conversation," he reflected; "the difficulty is to
find anybody to converse with," and he thought first of Carlotta, and
then of Miss Camilla Van Arsdale, but chiefly of the latter, for
conversation had not been the strong point of the passionate,
light-hearted Spanish girl.) Upon a volume kindly offering to teach
astronomy to the lay mind without effort or trouble (43 T 790) and
manifestly cheap at $1.10, he bestowed a more respectful attention, for
the desert nights were long and lonely.

Eventually he arrived at the department appropriate to his age and the
almost universal ambition of the civilized male, to wit, clothing.
Deeply, judiciously, did he meditate and weigh the advantages as between
745 J 460 ("Something new--different--economical--efficient. An all-wool
suit embodying all the features that make for clothes satisfaction. This
announcement is of tremendous importance"--as one might well have
inferred from the student's rapt expression) and 776 J 017 ("A
double-breasted, snappy, yet semi-conservative effect in dark-green
worsted, a special social value"), leaning to the latter because of a
purely literary response to that subtle and deft appeal of the
attributive "social." The devotee of Messrs. Sears-Roebuck was an
innately social person, though as yet his gregarious proclivities lay
undeveloped and unsuspected by himself. Also he was of a literary
tendency; but of this he was already self-conscious. He passed on to
ulsters and raincoats, divagated into the colorful realm of neckwear,
debated scarf-pins and cuff-links, visualized patterned shirtings, and
emerged to dream of composite sartorial grandeurs which, duly
synthesized into a long list of hopeful entries, were duly filed away
within the pages of 3 T 9901, the pocket ledger.

Footsteps shuffling along the right of way dispelled his visions. He
looked up to see two pedestrians who halted at his movement.