However, the gloves are bought.  I select a pair haphazard, and he pretends to perceive they fit perfectly by putting them over the back of my hand.  I make him assure me of the fit, and then buy the pair and proceed to take my old ones off and put the new on grimly.  If they split or the fingers are too long—­glovemakers have the most erratic conceptions of the human finger—­I have to buy another pair.

But the trouble only begins when you have bought your thing.  “Nothing more, sir?” he says.  “Nothing,” I say.  “Braces?” he says.  “No, thank you,” I say.  “Collars, cuffs?” He looks at mine swiftly but keenly, and with an unendurable suspicion.

He goes on, item after item.  Am I in rags, that I should endure this thing?  And I get sick of my everlasting “No, thank you”—­the monotony shows up so glaringly against his kaleidoscope variety.  I feel all the unutterable pettiness, the mean want of enterprise of my poor little purchase compared with the catholic fling he suggests.  I feel angry with myself for being thus played upon, furiously angry with him. “No, no!” I say.

“These tie-holders are new.”  He proceeds to show me his infernal tie-holders.  “They prevent the tie puckering,” he says with his eye on mine.  It’s no good.  “How much?” I say.

This whets him to further outrage.  “Look here, my man!” I say at last, goaded to it, “I came here for gloves.  After endless difficulties I at last induced you to let me have gloves.  I have also been intimidated, by the most shameful hints and insinuations, into buying that beastly tie-holder.  I’m not a child that I don’t know my own needs.  Now will you let me go?  How much do you want?”

That usually checks him.

The above is a fair specimen of a shopman—­a favourable rendering.  There are other things they do, but I simply cannot write about them because it irritates me so to think of them.  One infuriating manoeuvre is to correct your pronunciation.  Another is to make a terrible ado about your name and address—­even when it is quite a well-known name.

After I have bought things at a shop I am quite unfit for social intercourse.  I have to go home and fume.  There was a time when Euphemia would come and discuss my purchase with a certain levity, but on one occasion....

Some day these shopmen will goad me too far.  It’s almost my only consolation, indeed, to think what I am going to do when I do break out.  There is a salesman somewhere in the world, he going on his way and I on mine, who will, I know, prove my last straw.  It may be he will read this—­amused—­recking little of the mysteries of fate....  Is killing a salesman murder, like killing a human being?

THE BOOK OF CURSES