“Look here!” I say, as bitterly as possible.  “I don’t come here to play at Guessing Games.  Never mind your prices.  I want some gloves.  Get me some!”

This cows him a little, but very little.  “May I ask your size, sir?” he says, a trifle more respectfully.

One would think I spent all my time remembering the size of my gloves.  However, it is no good resenting it.  “It’s either seven or nine,” I say in a tired way.

He just begins another question, and then he catches my eye and stops and goes away to obtain some gloves, and I get a breathing space.  But why do they keep on with this cross-examination?  If I knew exactly what I wanted—­description, price, size—­I should not go to a shop at all, it would save me such a lot of trouble just to send a cheque to the Stores.  The only reason why I go into a tradesman’s shop is because I don’t know what I want exactly, am in doubt about the name or the size, or the price, or the fashion, and want a specialist to help me.  The only reason for having shopmen instead of automatic machines is that one requires help in buying things.  When I want gloves, the shopman ought to understand his business sufficiently well to know better than I do what particular kind of gloves I ought to be wearing, and what is a fair price for them.  I don’t see why I should teach him what is in fashion and what is not.  A doctor does not ask you what kind of operation you want and what price you will pay for it.  But I really believe these outfitter people would let me run about London wearing white cotton gloves and a plaid comforter without lifting a finger to prevent me.

And, by the bye, that reminds me of a scandalous trick these salesmen will play you.  Sometimes they have not the thing you want, and then they make you buy other things.  I happen to have, through no fault of my own, a very small head, and consequently for one long summer I wore a little boy’s straw hat about London with the colours of a Paddington Board School, simply because a rascal outfitter hadn’t my size in a proper kind of headgear, and induced me to buy the thing by specious representations.  He must have known perfectly well it was not what I ought to wear.  It seems never to enter into a shopman’s code of honour that he ought to do his best for his customer.  Since that, however, I have noticed lots of people about who have struck me in a new light as triumphs of the salesman, masterpieces in the art of incongruity; age in the garb of youth, corpulence put off with the size called “slender men’s”; unhappy, gentle, quiet men with ties like oriflammes, breasts like a kingfisher’s, and cataclysmal trouser patterns.  Even so, if the shopkeeper had his will, should we all be.  Those poor withered maiden ladies, too, who fill us with a kind of horror, with their juvenile curls, their girlish crudity of colouring, their bonnets, giddy, tottering, hectic.  It overcomes me with remorse to think that I myself have accused them of vanity and folly.  It overcomes me with pain to hear the thoughtless laugh aloud after them, in the public ways.  For they are simply short-sighted trustful people, the myopic victims of the salesman and saleswoman.  The little children gibe at them, pelt even....  And somewhere in the world a draper goes unhung.