rs.
Schiller was doing a little housecleaning: he could hear the monotonous
rasp of a carpet-sweeper passing back and forth in an adjoining room.
He creaked irritably downstairs, and heard the usual splashing behind
the bathroom door. In the frame of the hall mirror he saw a pencilled
note: Will Mrs. Smith please call Tarkington 1565, it said.
Unreasonably annoyed, he tore a piece of paper out of his notebook and
wrote on it Will Mrs. Smith please call Bath 4200. Mounting to the
second floor he tapped on the bathroom door. "Don't come in!" cried an
agitated female voice. He thrust the memorandum under the door, and
left the house.

Walking the windy paths of Prospect Park he condemned himself to
relentless self-scrutiny. "I've damned myself forever with her," he
groaned, "unless I can prove something." The vision of Titania's face
silhouetted against the shelves of books came maddeningly to his mind.
"I was going to have such a good time, and you've spoilt it all!" With
what angry conviction she had said: "I never saw a man like you
before--and I've seen a good many!"

Even in his disturbance of soul the familiar jargon of his profession
came naturally to utterance. "At least she admits I'm DIFFERENT," he
said dolefully. He remembered the first item in the Grey-Matter Code,
a neat little booklet issued by his employers for the information of
their representatives:

Business is built upon CONFIDENCE. Before you can sell Grey-Matter
Service to a Client, you must sell YOURSELF.

"How am I going to sell myself to her?" he wondered. "I've simply got
to deliver, that's all. I've got to give her service that's DIFFERENT.
If I fall down on this, she'll never speak to me again. Not only that,
the firm will lose the old man's account. It's simply unthinkable."

Nevertheless, he thought about it a good deal, stimulated from time to
time as in the course of his walk (which led him out toward the
faubourgs of Flatbush) he passed long vistas of signboards, which he
imagined placarded with vivid lithographs in behalf of the Chapman
prunes. "Adam and Eve Ate Prunes On Their Honeymoon" was a slogan that
flashed into his head, and he imagined a magnificent painting
illustrating this text. Thus, in hours of stress, do all men turn for
comfort to their chosen art. The poet, battered by fate, heals himself
in the niceties of rhyme. The prohibitionist can weather the blackest
melancholia by meditating the contorti