"I tell you it is Ming!" the young millionaire insisted. "I 'll buy it."
"I 'm afraid you won't, Mr. Rensselaer," the Manchu answered blandly. "I won't sell it to you."
"Then you 'll sell me nothing, ever again," Rensselaer decreed in a passion.
"Oh, very well," Li Sin smiled.
To Morganstern, the munitions magnate, he was much shorter. The bulky financier rushed into the store rolling a cigar about his fat lips. He wanted a rug, he said, an expensive one, the best in the store. Li Sin smiled a trifle cynically and pointed out something on the wall.
"A Persian thirteenth-century," he explained curtly. "Used to belong to a shah of Persia. It costs seventeen thousand dollars."
"I 'll take it," Morganstern nodded. "I want something for the bedroom floor."
"But, dear sir," Li Sin expostulated, "one does n't put that on the floor. One hangs it on a wall."
"I don't care a damn." The munitions man drew out his check-book. "Anything good enough for the shah of Persia's wall is good enough for my feet."
"My good sir—" Li Sin's voice was as bland as ever—"you are making a mistake. There are several grass-rug emporiums on Second Avenue. Go into the next drug store and look one up in a telephone-book. Take a trolley across Fifty-ninth Street. They 'll sell you one, and you can carry it home beneath your arm." And abruptly he left Morganstern.