He goes on, item after item. Am I in rags, that I should endure this thing? And I get sick of my everlasting "No, thank you"—the monotony shows up so glaringly against his kaleidoscope variety. I feel all the unutterable pettiness, the mean want of enterprise of my poor little purchase compared with the catholic fling he suggests. I feel angry with myself for being thus played upon, furiously angry with him. "No, no!" I say.
"These tie-holders are new." He proceeds to show me his infernal tie-holders. "They prevent the tie puckering," he says with his eye on mine. It's no good. "How much?" I say.
This whets him to further outrage. "Look here, my man!" I say at last, goaded to it, "I came here for gloves. After endless difficulties I at last induced you to let me have gloves. I have also been intimidated, by the most shameful hints and insinuations, into buying that beastly tie-holder. I'm not a child that I don't know my own needs. Now will you let me go? How much do you want?"
That usually checks him.
The above is a fair specimen of a shopman—a favourable rendering. There are other things they do, but I simply cannot write about them because it irritates me so to think of them. One infuriating manœuvre is to correct your pronunciation. Another is to make a terrible ado about your name and address—even when it is quite a well-known name.
After I have bought things at a shop I am quite unfit for social intercourse. I have to go home and fume. There was a time when Euphemia would come and discuss my purchase with a certain levity, but on one occasion....
Some day these shopmen will goad me too far. It's almost my only consolation, indeed, to think what I am going to do when I do break out. There is a salesman somewhere in the world, he going on his way and I on mine, who will, I know, prove my last straw. It may be he will read this—amused—recking little of the mysteries of fate.... Is killing a salesman murder, like killing a human being?