s whose exquisiteness she was almost
afraid to look at. Her thin little body was wonderfully fitted, managed,
encouraged to make the most of its long-ignored outlines.

"Her ladyship's slenderness is a great advantage," said the wisely
inciting ones. "There is no such advantage as delicacy of line."

Summing up the character of their customer with the saleswoman's
eye, they realised the discretion of turning to Miss Vanderpoel for
encouragement, though she was the younger of the two, and bore no title.
They were aware of the existence of persons of rank who were not lavish
patrons, but the name of Vanderpoel held most promising suggestions. To
an English shopkeeper the American has, of late years, represented
the spender--the type which, whatsoever its rank and resources, has,
mysteriously, always money to hand over counters in exchange for things
it chances to desire to possess. Each year surges across the Atlantic a
horde of these fortunate persons, who, to the sober, commercial British
mind, appear to be free to devote their existences to travel and
expenditure. This contingent appears shopping in the various shopping
thoroughfares; it buys clothes, jewels, miscellaneous attractive things,
making its purchases of articles useful or decorative with a freedom
from anxiety in its enjoyment which does not mark the mood of the
ordinary shopper. In the everyday purchaser one is accustomed to take
for granted, as a factor in his expenditure, a certain deliberation and
uncertainty; to the travelling American in Europe, shopping appears to
be part of the holiday which is being made the most of. Surely, all the
neat, smart young persons who buy frocks and blouses, hats and coats,
hosiery and chains, cannot be the possessors of large incomes; there
must be, even in America, a middle class of middle-class resources, yet
these young persons, male and female, and most frequently unaccompanied
by older persons--seeing what they want, greet it with expressions of
pleasure, waste no time in appropriating and paying for it, and go away
as in relief and triumph--not as in that sober joy which is clouded by
afterthought. The sales people are sometimes even vaguely cheered by their
gay lack of any doubt as to the wisdom of their getting what they admire,
and rejoicing in it. If America always buys in this holiday mood, it
must be an enviable thing to be a shopkeeper in their New York or Boston
or San Francisco. Who would not make a fortu