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 terial side of his transaction. This was all standard stuff, indistinguishable (except for the trademark) from the stock upon the Slengels' shelves. The prices of the Rountree company and of the Slengels and of the other chief competitors differed not by a penny, Jay learned; and he thumbed some of the things, not to test the quality, but while thinking over them and himself—and Lida.

As Lowry had suggested to him in a frank interchange during lunch, there was no good reason in God's world why Phil Metten or any one else should come for these things to Rountree rather than to Slengels, except for what went to Phil with the goods. For a time, Lida and Jay Rountree had been going with this stock; Lida and he had been giving Mr. and Mrs. Phil Metten, and the Misses Metten, something which the Slengels could not supply; he had been including rights of society with Lida and himself as a sort of premium with the order. . . Nucast had reached his original association with Lida in a similar fashion.

Jay recoiled from the stock shelves; yet, as he gazed about, he was surprised with the force of a conflicting sensation. As long as he could remember anything, he had known the look of these neat, precise piles of "parts." His first expedition into the city, of which he had any recollection, had been to the plant and to the whir and hum of marvelous machines at which stood countless men, in straight rows, working. Upon that unforgetable occasion, and nearly always afterwards, a switch-engine tooted outside pushing and pulling at cars which were loaded with Rountree goods. Big boxes slid and tumbled, most thrillingly, down long, shiny chutes.