“Speaknubout prices,” the man in the velour hat observed, fingering the elk-tooth on his heavy watch-chain, “I’d like to know where they get this stuff about clothes coming down.  Now, you take this suit I got on.”  He pinched his trousers-leg.  “Four years ago I paid forty-two fifty for it, and it was real sure-’nough value.  Well, here the other day I went into a store back home and asked to see a suit, and the fellow yanks out some hand-me-downs that, honest, I wouldn’t put on a hired man.  Just out of curiosity I asks him, ‘What you charging for that junk?’ ‘Junk,’ he says, ‘what d’ you mean junk?  That’s a swell piece of goods, all wool—­’ Like hell!  It was nice vegetable wool, right off the Ole Plantation!  ‘It’s all wool,’ he says, ‘and we get sixty-seven ninety for it.’  ’Oh, you do, do you!’ I says.  ‘Not from me you don’t,’ I says, and I walks right out on him.  You bet!  I says to the wife, ‘Well,’ I said, ’as long as your strength holds out and you can go on putting a few more patches on papa’s pants, we’ll just pass up buying clothes."’

“That’s right, brother.  And just look at collars, frinstance—­”

“Hey!  Wait!” the fat man protested.  “What’s the matter with collars?  I’m selling collars!  D’ you realize the cost of labor on collars is still two hundred and seven per cent. above—­”

They voted that if their old friend the fat man sold collars, then the price of collars was exactly what it should be; but all other clothing was tragically too expensive.  They admired and loved one another now.  They went profoundly into the science of business, and indicated that the purpose of manufacturing a plow or a brick was so that it might be sold.  To them, the Romantic Hero was no longer the knight, the wandering poet, the cowpuncher, the aviator, nor the brave young district attorney, but the great sales-manager, who had an Analysis of Merchandizing Problems on his glass-topped desk, whose title of nobility was “Go-getter,” and who devoted himself and all his young samurai to the cosmic purpose of Selling—­not of selling anything in particular, for or to anybody in particular, but pure Selling.

The shop-talk roused Paul Riesling.  Though he was a player of violins and an interestingly unhappy husband, he was also a very able salesman of tar-roofing.  He listened to the fat man’s remarks on “the value of house-organs and bulletins as a method of jazzing-up the Boys out on the road;” and he himself offered one or two excellent thoughts on the use of two-cent stamps on circulars.  Then he committed an offense against the holy law of the Clan of Good Fellows.  He became highbrow.

They were entering a city.  On the outskirts they passed a steel-mill which flared in scarlet and orange flame that licked at the cadaverous stacks, at the iron-sheathed walls and sullen converters.

“My Lord, look at that—­beautiful!” said Paul.

“You bet it’s beautiful, friend.  That’s the Shelling-Horton Steel Plant, and they tell me old John Shelling made a good three million bones out of munitions during the war!” the man with the velour hat said reverently.