These consisted in three girls behind the counter and one customer before it; the latter commanding the attention and services of a fair young woman with a pleasant manner; while of the two disengaged saleswomen, one bold, disdainful brunette was preoccupied with her back hair and prepared mutinously to ignore anything remotely resembling a belated customer whose demands might busy her beyond the closing hour, and the other had a merry eye and a receptive smile for the hesitant little man with the funny clothes and the quaint pink face of embarrassment.  In most abject consternation, P. Sybarite turned and fled.

Weathering the end of the glove counter and shaping a course through the aisle that paralleled it, he found himself in a channel of horrors, threatened on one side by a display of most intimate lingerie, belaced and beribboned distractingly, on the other by a long rank of slender and gracious (if stolid) feminine limbs, one and all neatly amputated above their bended knees and bedight in silken hosiery to shame the rainbow; while to right and left, behind these impudent revelations, lurked sirens with shameless eyes and mouths of scarlet mockery.

A cold sweat damped the forehead of P. Sybarite.  Inconsistently, his face flamed.  He stared fixedly dead ahead and tore through that aisle like a delicate-minded jack-rabbit.  He thought giggles were audible in his wake; and ere he could escape found his way barred by Authority and Dignity in one wonderfully frock-coated person.

“You were looking for something?” demanded this menace incarnate, in an awful voice accompanied by a terrible gesture.

P. Sybarite brought up standing, his nose six inches from and his eyes held in fascination to the imitation pearl scarf-pin in the beautiful cravat affected by his interlocutor.

“Gloves—!” he gasped guiltily.

“This way, if you please.”

With this, Dignity and Authority clamped an inexorable hand about his upper arm, swung him round, and piloted him gently but ruthlessly back the way he had come, back to the glove counter, where he was planted directly in front of the dashing, dark saleslady with absorbing back hair and the manner of remote hauteur.

“Miss Brady, this gentleman wants to see some gloves.”

The eyes of Miss Brady flashed ominously; as plain as print, they said:  “Does, does he?  Well, leave him to me!”

Aloud, she murmured from an incalculable distance:  “Oh, ve-ry well!”

A moment later, looking over the customer’s head, she added icily: 
“What kind?”

The floor-walker retired, leaving P. Sybarite a free agent but none the less haunted by a feeling that a suspicious eye was being kept on the small of his back.  He stammered something quite inarticulate.

The brune goddess shaped ironic lips: 

“Chauffeurs’, I presoom?”

A measure of self-possession—­akin to the deadly coolness of the cornered rat—­returned to the badgered little man.