He waited close beside a man with a pink face, a moustache, and an almost perfect figure, who was standing very still, dressed from head to foot in blue-and-white stripes.  He seemed the apotheosis of what a man should be, his face composed in a deathless simper:  “Long, long have been the struggles of man, but civilization has produced me at last.  Further than this it cannot go.  Nothing shall make me continue my line.  In me the end is reached.  See my back:  ’The Amateur.  This perfect style, 8s. 11d.  Great reduction.’”

He would not talk to Hilary, and the latter was compelled to watch the shopmen.  It was but half an hour to closing time; the youths were moving languidly, bickering a little, in the absence of their customers—­like flies on a pane unable to get out into the sun.  Two of them came and asked him what they might serve him with; they were so refined and pleasant that Hilary was on the point of buying what he did not want.  The reappearance of the little model saved him.

“It’s thirty shillings; five and eleven was the cheapest, and stockings, and I bought some sta—–­”

Hilary produced the money hastily.

“This is a very dear shop,” she said.

When she had paid the bill, and Hilary had taken from her a large brown-paper parcel, they journeyed on together.  He had armoured his face now in a slightly startled quizzicality, as though, himself detached, he were watching the adventure from a distance.

On the central velvet seat of the boot and shoe department, a lady, with an egret in her hat, was stretching out a slim silk-stockinged foot, waiting for a boot.  She looked with negligent amusement at this common little girl and her singular companion.  This look of hers seemed to affect the women serving, for none came near the little model.  Hilary saw them eyeing her boots, and, suddenly forgetting his role of looker-on, he became very angry.  Taking out his watch, he went up to the eldest woman.

“If somebody,” he said, “does not attend this young lady within a minute, I shall make a personal complaint to Mr. Thorn.”

The hand of the watch, however, had not completed its round before a woman was at the little model’s side.  Hilary saw her taking off her boot, and by a sudden impulse he placed himself between her and the lady.  In doing this, he so far forgot his delicacy as to fix his eyes on the little model’s foot.  The sense of physical discomfort which first attacked him became a sort of aching in his heart.  That brown, dingy stocking was darned till no stocking, only darning, and one toe and two little white bits of foot were seen, where the threads refused to hold together any longer.

The little model wagged the toe uneasily—­she had hoped, no doubt, that it would not protrude, then concealed it with her skirt.  Hilary moved hastily away; when he looked again, it was not at her, but at the lady.