‘I’m glad I sent for that hat,’ he said, smiling absently at the Great Wheel over a mile and a half of roofs.

The key to his character and his career lay in the fact that he invariably found sufficient courage to respond to his instincts, and that his instincts were romantic.  They had led him in various ways, sometimes to grandiose and legitimate triumphs, sometimes to hidden shames which it is merciful to ignore.  In the main, they had served him well.  It was in obedience to an instinct that he had capped the nine stories of the Hugo building with a dome and had made his bed under the dome.  It was in obedience to another instinct that he had sent for the hat.

‘Very pretty, isn’t it?’ he observed to Shawn, when Simon handed him the insubstantial and gay object and restored the gold token.  They were at a window in the circular room; the couch had magically melted away.

‘I admire it, sir,’ said Shawn, and withdrew.

‘Dolt!’ he cried out upon Shawn in his heart. ’You didn’t see her at work on it.  As if you could appreciate her exquisite taste and the amazing skill of her blanched fingers!  I alone can appreciate these things!’

He hung the hat on a Louis Quatorze screen, and blissfully gazed at it, her creation.

‘But I must be careful,’ he muttered—­’I must be careful.’

A clerk entered with his personal letters.  It was scarcely seven o’clock, but these fifteen or twenty envelopes had already been sorted from the three thousand missives that constituted his first post; he had his own arrangement with the Post-Office.

‘So it’s coming at last,’ he said to himself, as he opened an envelope marked ‘Private and Confidential’ in red ink.  The autograph note within was from Senior Polycarp, principal partner in Polycarps, the famous firm of company-promoting solicitors, and it heralded a personal visit from the august lawyer at 11.30 that day.

In the midst of dictating instructions to the clerk, Mr. Hugo stopped and rang for Shawn.

‘Take that back,’ he commanded, indicating the hat.  ‘I’ve done with it.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The hat went.

‘I may just as well be discreet,’ his thought ran.

But her image, the image of the artist in hats, illumined more brightly than ever his soul.

CHAPTER II

THE ESTABLISHMENT

Seven years before, when, having unostentatiously acquired the necessary land, and an acre or two over, Hugo determined to rebuild his premises and to burst into full blossom, he visited America and Paris, and amongst other establishments inspected Wanamaker’s, the Bon Marche, and the Magasins du Louvre.  The result disappointed him.  He had expected to pick up ideas, but he picked up nothing save the Bon Marche system of vouchers, by which a customer buying in several departments is spared the trouble of paying separately in each department.  He came to the conclusion that the art of flinging money away in order that it may return tenfold was yet quite in its infancy.  He said to himself, ’I will build a shop.’