"Woollen goods—third floor!" he finally grunted.
His manner was not of the sort to inspire much confidence, but we took his word—also the elevator. And when we say that we "took" the elevator, we mean that we fought our way into it through an army of maddened suffragettes. We bit the ends off two feathers; we were stabbed in several places with hat-pins; and finally at the third floor we were disgorged into the woolliest woollen department we have ever seen. It was full of woolly garments—some of a most embarrassingly intimate description—and ladies. There wasn't a man in sight. It was rather trying for us. There was on view a great deal of raiment of the sort that is "knit to fit," and—well, it has always seemed to us that there is something rather gross about wool. Now muslin—especially if complicated with lace and insertion—is filmy and charmingly illusive. But wool—no!
We picked out a plump little clerk-lady with woolly hair and brown eyes. We don't know why we picked her out particularly, except that she was the sort of girl we would naturally pick out. She seemed a young person who would know about hug-me-tights. So we went right up to her and—remembering just in time not to take off our hat as if she were a "ladifren" of ours—we asked her as casually as the nature of the case would permit where we could get a hug-me-tight.
"A hug-me-tight—you want a hug-me-tight? You—you?" and the shameless little huzzy buried her face in a pair of blankets with blue borders and bleated convulsively.
We moved on—with dignity, but hurriedly. It was a painful thing to have happen. There are dissolute and daring characters who would perhaps have enjoyed the situation. They might even have taken occasion from it to enter into conversation and find out the young lady's Christian name—if Christian—and whether or not she liked movie-shows. But ours is a mind above such trivial manoeuvres. We moved on, while a clammy perspiration bedewed our brow.
The next time we picked out the oldest and homeliest clerk we could see in that department. Taking courage from the thought that here was a woman who could not possibly put any personal significance into a request for a hug-me-tight, we went up to her and told her we wanted one. Involuntarily we lowered our voice till it was little above a whisper. Too late we realized our mistake. She gave us one horrified glance, and then, no doubt, recalling all the terrible stories she had read of young and pretty girls being "loored" to "roon" and never heard of more, she turned to cry for help. But we stopped her short.
"Madam," we said sternly, "the hug-me-tight referred to is a nice garment for a woolly old lady—no, no, a woolly garment for a nice old lady—and the sole motive in asking you for it is the hope that you might direct——"
"Three circles to the left!" she snapped in a sour tone, which for a wild moment suggested that she was disappointed. But we would hate to think that—at her age, too!
It was fully ten minutes before we could nerve ourself sufficiently to go to that third circle. Instead, we went over and looked at a lot of assorted mittens for children. We gazed at them with an intensity that must have given the young lady behind the counter the impression that we were the father of at least ten children—all small.
We even got a silly notion of buying a pair of them for the old lady—she has rather small hands. And there was a nice pair of red ones on a tape. Whenever she went out in the back-yard to make snowballs—but we decided against it. We were told to get a hug-me-tight; and a hug-me-tight we were resolved to get, even if they sent in a hurry-up call for the Morality Squad.