Also other articles. We enjoyed buying things, and even to this day I recall with pleasure our first great revel in a department store.
For the most part we united our judgments and acted jointly. But at times we were enticed apart by fascinating novelties and selected recklessly, without consultation.
As for the Precious Ones, they galloped about, demanding that we should buy everything in sight, with a total disregard of our requirements or resources.
It was wonderful though how cheap everything seemed, and how much we seemed to need, even for a beginning. It was also wonderful how those insidious figures told in the final settlement.
Let it be understood, I cherish no resentment toward the salesmen. Reflecting now on the matter, I am, on the whole, grateful. They found out where we were from, and where we were going to live, and they sold us accordingly.
I think we interested them, and that they rather liked us. If not, I am sure they would have sold us worse things and more of them. They could have done so, easily. Hence my gratitude to the salesmen; but the man at the transfer desk remains unforgiven.
I am satisfied, now, that he was an unscrupulous person, a perjured, case-hardened creature whom it is every man's duty to destroy. But at the time he seemed the very embodiment of good intentions.
He assured us heartily, as he gave us our change, that we should have immediate delivery. We had explained at some length that this was important, and why. He waved us off with the assurance that we need give ourselves no uneasiness in the matter—that, in all probability, the matting we had purchased as a floor basis would be there before we were.
He knew that this would start us post-haste for our apartment, which it did. We even ran, waving and shouting, after a particular car when another just like it was less than a half block behind.
We breathed more easily when we arrived at our new address and found that we were in good season. When five minutes more had passed, however, and still no signs of our matting, a vague uneasiness began to manifest itself.