Each year surges across the Atlantic a
horde of these fortunate persons, who, to the sober, commercial British
mind, appear to be free to devote their existences to travel and
expenditure. This contingent appears shopping in the various shopping
thoroughfares; it buys clothes, jewels, miscellaneous attractive things,
making its purchases of articles useful or decorative with a freedom
from anxiety in its enjoyment which does not mark the mood of the
ordinary shopper. In the everyday purchaser one is accustomed to take
for granted, as a factor in his expenditure, a certain deliberation and
uncertainty; to the travelling American in Europe, shopping appears to
be part of the holiday which is being made the most of. Surely, all the
neat, smart young persons who buy frocks and blouses, hats and coats,
hosiery and chains, cannot be the possessors of large incomes; there
must be, even in America, a middle class of middle-class resources, yet
these young persons, male and female, and most frequently unaccompanied
by older persons--seeing what they want, greet it with expressions of
pleasure, waste no time in appropriating and paying for it, and go away
as in relief and triumph--not as in that sober joy which is clouded by
afterthought.
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