He took some more whisky.

“A kind of grey horror came upon me.  I don’t know if I can describe it.  We went through vast vistas of chairs, of hall-tables, of machine-made pictures, of curtains, huge wildernesses of carpets, and ever this cold, unsympathetic shopman led us on, and ever and again made us buy this or that.  He had a perfectly grey eye—­the colour of an overcast sky in January—­and he seemed neither to hate us nor to detest us, but simply to despise us, to feel such an overwhelming contempt for our petty means and our petty lives, as an archangel might feel for an apple-maggot.  It made me think....”

He lit a fresh cigarette.

“I had a kind of vision.  I do not know if you will understand.  The Warehouse of Life, with our Individual Fate hurrying each of us through.  Showing us with a covert sneer all the good things that we cannot afford.  A magnificent Rosewood love affair, for instance, deep and rich, fitted complete, some hours of perfect life, some acts of perfect self-sacrifice, perfect self-devotion....  You ask the price.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine?” I quoted.

“That’s it.  All the things one might do, if the purse of one’s courage were not so shallow.  If it wasn’t for the lack of that coinage, Bellows, every man might be magnificent.  There’s heroism, there’s such nobility as no one has ever attained to, ready to hand.  Anyone, if it were not for this lack of means, might be a human god in twenty-four hours....  You see the article.  You cannot buy it.  No one buys it.  It stands in the emporium, I suppose, for show—­on the chance of a millionaire.  And the shopman waves his hand to it on your way to the Painted Pine.

“Then you meet other couples and solitary people going about, each with a gloomy salesman leading.  The run of them look uncomfortable; some are hot about the ears and in the spiteful phase of ill-temper; all look sick of the business except the raw new-comers.  It’s the only time they will ever select any furniture, their first chance and their last.  Most of their selections are hurried a little.  The salesman must not be kept all day....  Yet it goes hard with you if you buy your Object in Life and find it just a ‘special line’ made to sell....  We’re all amateurs at living, just as we are all amateurs at furnishing—­or dying.  Some of the poor devils one meets carry tattered little scraps of paper, and fumble conscientiously with stumpy pencils.  It’s a comfort to see how you go, even if you do have to buy rubbish.  ’If we have this so good, dear, I don’t know how we shall manage in the kitchen,’ says the careful housewife....  So it is we do our shopping in the Great Emporium.”

“You will have to rewrite your Ballade,” said I, “and put all that in.”

“I wish I could,” said the poet.

“And while you were having these very fine moods?”