America that would expect to be called pious, but if one is deeply and
obstinately interested in the Golden Rule, and in getting crowds of
people to believe in it at a time, it is impossible not to think what
sweeps of opportunity department stores would have with it--with the
Golden Rule. With thousands of people flowing in and out all the week,
and with hundreds of clerks to attend to it, eight hours a day, there
would hardly seem to be any limit to what such a store could do in
making the Golden Rule a direct, a pointed and personal thing, a thing
that could not be evaded and could not be forgotten by thousands of
people. The same people all going in and out of department stores, vast
congregations of them, eight hours a day, which ministers can only get
at in small lots, three hundred or so, twenty minutes a week, and can
only get at with words even then--all of them being convinced in terms
they understand, and in terms they keenly feel, convinced in hats that
they will see over and over again, convinced in velvets that they are
going to put on and off for years, in laces, in waistcoats, shoes, in
dining-room chairs, convinced in the very underclothes next to their
skins, the clothes they sleep in all night, in the very plates on which
they eat, while all the time they keep remembering, or being reminded,
just how the things were bought, and just what was claimed for them and
what was not claimed for them, and thinking how the claims came true or
how they did not.

* * * * *

I just saw lying on the table as I came through the hall a moment ago a
hat which (out of all the long rows of hats I can see faintly reaching
across the years) will always be to me a memorable hat. I am free to say
that, after all the ladies it has been taken off to, my great memory of
that hat is now and always will be, as long as I live, the department
store at which I bought it, and the things the department store, before
I got through with it, managed to make the hat say.

I had been in the store the day before and selected, in broad daylight,
with a big mirror staring me out of countenance, a hat which was a
quarter of a size too large. To clinch the matter, I had ordered four
ventilating holes to be punched in it, and had it sent to my rooms to be
my hat--implacably my hat as I supposed, for better for worse, for
richer for poorer--always. The next morning, after standing before a
mirror and trying hope