inted Pine?_'

"Comes round again, you see! Then _L'Envoy_:--

"'Salesman, sad is the truth I trow:
Winsome walnut can never be mine.
Poets are cheap. And their poetry. So
_Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine?_'

"Prosaic! As all true poetry is, nowadays. But, how I tired as the
afternoon moved on! At first I was interested in the shopman's amazing
lack of imagination, and the glory of that fond dream of mine--love in a
cottage, you know--still hung about me. I had ideas come--like that
Ballade--and every now and then Annie told me to write notes. I think my
last gleam of pleasure was in choosing the drawing-room chairs. There is
scope for fantasy in chairs. Then----"

He took some more whisky.

"A kind of grey horror came upon me. I don't know if I can describe it.
We went through vast vistas of chairs, of hall-tables, of machine-made
pictures, of curtains, huge wildernesses of carpets, and ever this cold,
unsympathetic shopman led us on, and ever and again made us buy this or
that. He had a perfectly grey eye--the colour of an overcast sky in
January--and he seemed neither to hate us nor to detest us, but simply
to despise us, to feel such an overwhelming contempt for our petty means
and our petty lives, as an archangel might feel for an apple-maggot. It
made me think...."

He lit a fresh cigarette.

"I had a kind of vision. I do not know if you will understand. The
Warehouse of Life, with our Individual Fate hurrying each of us through.
Showing us with a covert sneer all the good things that we cannot
afford. A magnificent Rosewood love affair, for instance, deep and
rich, fitted complete, some hours of perfect life, some acts of perfect
self-sacrifice, perfect self-devotion.... You ask the price."

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine?" I quoted.

"That's it. All the things one might do, if the purse of one's courage
were not so shallow. If it wasn't for the lack of that coinage, Bellows,
every man might be magnificent. There's heroism, there's such nobility
as no one has ever attained to, ready to hand. Anyone, if it were not
for this lack of means, might be a human god in twenty-four hours....
You see the article. You cannot buy it. No one buys it. It stands in the
emporium, I suppose, for show--on the chance of a millionaire. And the
shopman waves his hand to it on your way to the Painted Pine.

"Then you meet other couples and