"Always for hats," he said seriously.
I tried to be facetious. "Dear me! You must know all there is to know about hats."
He shook his head. "Nobody knows anything about hats." He added, very much in earnest, "Style is one of the great obscure mysteries of life."
This had always been one of my observations, but one I have petulantly and impatiently deplored. I had never thought to hear it expressed with such heartfelt gravity and weight by a man of such evident vigor of personality.
I said, laughing uneasily, "It makes one very self-conscious about one's own hat, to know oneself in the presence of such a connoisseur."
He reassured me: "Oh, I never look at hats except in the way of business." In his turn he looked vague, and let his eyes wander, evidently much bored with my remarks. In another moment he would have turned away, but just then an acquaintance came up to me, addressing me by name, and my new interlocutor broke in with a quite human eagerness, "Oh, are you Mr. John P. Hulme's niece?"
"Why, do you know my Uncle John?" I cried astonished.
"He's one of the best business friends I have," he assured me, "and I have often seen the picture of you and the children he has on his desk. You must let me go to see them. I've got grown-up children of my own. It will be a real treat to me to know some American children here."
In this casual manner, slipping in on the good graces of my little son and daughter, I entered a world the very existence of which I had never suspected, long and frequent as had been my sojourns in Paris; the world of hat-buyers. And I had for guide the very dean and master of the guild, to whom the younger aspirants looked up, whose sure, trained instinct was their despair and inspiration.
It was perhaps his influence, dominating that circle, which made them all so serious and intent on mastering their profession, so respectful of their chosen occupation, so willing to give it the very best of their judgment and taste. This was the more remarkable as, with the exception of my new friend, they were quite the opposite of serious-minded men and women, and, in the intervals of the exercise of their profession, enjoyed rather more than was good for their health, morals, and pocketbooks, the multiple occasions offered by a great city to damage those possessions. I was not at all in sympathy with what seemed to me the indifference of their relaxations in a country so stricken as France; but I could not withhold my astonished admiration for the excellent seriousness with which they approached their business. I would have blushed to disclose to them the light shallow femininity of my careless, rather slighting attitude towards "la mode." Also I was amazed at the prodigious financial importance of their operations. The sums which, without a blink, they paid out for hats, and the number of hats they thus secured and the further sums which they looked forward to paying into the coffers of the United States Customs, sounded to me as unbelievable as those nightmare calculations as to the distance of the stars from the earth or how much it has cost to build the Panama Canal.