atues,
paintings; things rare and beautiful and exotic from every quarter of
the globe, "from silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon." And they are
not collections, they are not the treasures of some proud house,
although they might have been once; they are for sale; they may be
bought by anybody--who has the price.

But who has the price? That stout woman riding by in her limousine, with
a Pomeranian on her lap instead of a baby? That fifteen-dollar-a-week
chorus-girl in a cab, half buried under a two-thousand-dollar
chinchilla coat? That elderly man who hobbles goutily out of his club
and walks a few short blocks to his house on Murray Hill, "for
exercise"? Assuredly, somebody has the price, for the shops are ever
open, the allurement of their windows never less. But not you, who
gaze hungry-eyed at these beautiful objects, and then go to a Sixth
Avenue department store and wonder if you can afford that Persian rug
made in Harlem, marked down from $50 to $48.87; or that colonial
mahogany bookcase glistening with brand new varnish. Envy gnaws at
your heart. And yet you had supposed that yours was a comfortable sort
of income--maybe four thousand dollars a year. Your father, on that
income, back in a New England suburb, was counted quite a man in the
community, and you put on airs. He selected the new minister, and you
set the style in socks. But now you are humiliated, embittered. You
rave against predatory wealth. Thus shop-windows do make Socialists of
us all.

Nor are you able to accept the shop-windows educationally, recalling
that when you went to Europe you saw nothing that had not already
stared at you through plate-glass on Fifth Avenue--for sale. Who wants
to view one of the chairs that a Medici sat in, only to recall that
months before he saw its mate in a shop-window at the corner of Fifth
Avenue and Fifty-first Street; or to contemplate a pious yellow
heathen bowed down before the image of Buddha, while the tinkly temple
bells are tinkling, only to have rise in his mind the memory of a much
larger and more venerable Buddha which used to smile out inscrutably
at the crossing of Twenty-ninth Street, below a much sweeter string of
tinkly temple bells?

We've a bigger, better Buddha in a cleaner (!), greener (!!) land,
Many miles from Mandalay.

There is no romance in an antique, be it god or chair or China plate,
when it is exposed for sale in a shop-window. And there is no romance
in it amid it