n see that it isn't all pique with
you. It's something else--something deeper. Oh, yes, it is! Now let
me tell you what happened when T. A. Buck invaded your old-time
territory. I was busy up in my department the morning he came in. I
had my head in a rack of coats, and a henny customer waiting. But I
sensed something stirring, and I stuck my head out of the coat-rack in
which I was fumbling. The department was aflutter like a poultry-yard.
Every woman in it, from the little new Swede stock-girl to Gladys
Hemingway, who is only working to wear out her old clothes, was
standing with her face toward the elevator, and on her face a look that
would make the ordinary door-mat marked 'Welcome' seem like an insult.
I kind of smoothed my back hair, because I knew that only one thing
could bring that look into a woman's face. And down the aisle came a
tall, slim, distinguished-looking, wonderfully tailored,
chamois-gloved, walking-sticked Fifth Avenue person with EYES! Of
course, I knew. But the other girls didn't. They just sort of fell
back at his approach, smitten. He didn't even raise an eyebrow to do
it. Now, Emma, I'm not exaggerating. I know what effect he had on me
and my girls, and, for that matter, every other man or woman in the
store. Why, he was a dream realized to most of 'em. These shrewd,
clever buyer-girls know plenty of men--business men of the slap-bang,
horn-blowing, bluff, good-natured, hello-kid kind--the kind that takes
you out to dinner and blows cigar smoke in your face. Along comes this
chap, elegant, well dressed and not even conscious of it, polished,
suave, smooth, low-voiced, well bred. Why, when he spoke to a girl, it
was the subtlest kind of flattery. Can you see little Sadie Harris, of
Duluth, drawing a mental comparison between Sam Bloom, the
store-manager, and this fascinating devil--Sam, red-faced, loud voiced,
shirt-sleeving it around the sample room, his hat pushed 'way back on
his head, chewing his cigar like mad, and wild-eyed for fear he's
buying wrong? Why, child, in our town, nobody carries a cane except
the Elks when they have their annual parade, and old man Schwenkel,
who's lame. And yet we all accepted that yellow walking-stick of
Buck's. It belonged to him. There isn't a skirt-buyer in the Middle
West that doesn't dream of him all night and push Featherlooms in the
store all day. Emma, I'm old and fat and fifty, but when I had dinner
with him at the Manitoba Ho