either for the hat or for the way I looked in it.  I had deliberately chosen it, looked at myself in cold blood in it, had those dreadful, irremovable, eternal air-holes dug into it.  I would buy a new one.  I jumped into a cab, and a moment after I arrived I found myself before the clerk from whom I had bought it, with a new one on my head, and was just reaching into my pocket for my purse when, to my astonishment, I heard, or seemed to hear, the great Department Store Itself, in the gentle accents of a young man with a yellow moustache, saying:  “I’m sorry”—­all seven storys of it gathering itself up softly, apparently, and saying “I’m sorry!” The young man explained that he was afraid the hat was wrong the day before, and thought he ought to have told me so, that the store would not want me to pay for the mistake.

I came home a changed man.  I had been hit by the Golden Rule before in department stores, but always rather subtly—­never with such a broad, beautiful flourish!  I made some faint acknowledgment, I have forgotten what, and rushed out of the store.

But I have never gone past the store since, on a ’bus, or in a taxi, or sliding through the walkers on the street, but I have looked up to it—­to its big, quiet windows, its broad, honest pillars fronting a world.

I take off my hat to it.

But it gave me more than a hat.

I think what a thousand department stores, stationed in a thousand places on this old planet, could do in touching the imagination of the world—­every day, day by day, cityfuls at a time.

I had found a department store that had absolutely identified itself with my interests, that could act about a hat the way a wife would—­a department store that looked forward to a permanent relation with me—­a great live machine that could be glad and sorry—­that really took me in, knew how I felt about things, cared how I looked as I walked down the street.  Sometimes I think of the poor, wounded, useless thing I took back to them, those pitiless holes punched in it—­just where no one else would ever have had them.  I am human.  I always feel about the store, that great marble and glass Face, when I go by it now as if, in spite of all the difficulties, it wanted me—­to be beautiful!  I at least feel and know that the people who were the brain, the daily moving consciousness behind the face—­wanted me to be a becoming customer to them.  They did not want to see me coming in, if it could possibly be helped, in that hat any more!

* * * * *

I have told this little history of a gray hat, not because it is in any way extraordinary, but because it is not.  The same thing, or something quite like it, expressing the same spirit, might have happened in any one of the best hundred department stores in the world.

Most people can remember a time, only a very little while ago, when clerks in our huge department stores or selling machines were not expected to be people who would think of things like this to do, or who would know how, or who would think to consider them good business if they did.