le, yellow-lighted people in little holes or stalls trying
to be human and natural in that long, low, indoor street of theirs,
crowds of women staring by them and picking at things. Always that
moving sidewalk of questions--that dull, eager stream of consciousness
sweeping by. No sunlight--just the crowds of covetousness and
shrewdness. I used to wonder about the clerks, many of them, and what
they would be like at home or under an apple tree or each with a bit of
blue sky to go with them. They used to seem in those days, as I looked,
mostly poor, underground creatures living in a sort of Subway of Things
in a hateful, hard, little world of clothes, each with his little study
or trick or knack of appearances, standing there and selling people
their good looks day after day at so much a yard.

To-day, in a hundred cities one can go into department shops where one
would get, standing and looking on idly, totally different impressions.
There are hundreds of thousands of young men and women who have made
being a clerk a new thing in the world. The public has already had its
imagination touched by them, and is beginning to deal with clerks, as a
class, on a different level.

This has been brought to pass because the employer has been thought of,
or has thought of himself, who engages and pays for in clerks the
highest qualities in human nature that he can get. He picks out and puts
in power, and persuades to be clerks, people who would have felt
superior to it in days gone by--men and women who habitually depend for
their efficiency in showing and selling goods upon their more generous
emotions and insights, their imaginations about other people. They
gather in their new customers, and keep up their long lists of old and
regular customers, through shrewd visions of service to people, and
through a technical gift for making the Golden Rule work.

When one looks at it practically, and from the point of view of all the
consequences, a bargain is the most spiritual, conclusive, most
self-revealing experience that people can have together. Every bargain
is a cross-section in three tenses of a man. A bargain tells everything
about people--who they are, and what they are like. It also tells what
they are going to be like unless they take pains; and it tells what they
are not going to be like too sometimes, and why.

The man who comes nearest in modern life to being a Pope, is the man who
determines in what spirit and by what met