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“Oh, ain’t it?” would be the antiphony of the unphilosophical one. “Why, I heard Wanamaker’s was trying to get you to sublet part of your floor space to them for next year.”

Daisy passed Joe’s corner every morning and evening.

“Hello, Two-by-Four!” was her usual greeting. “Seems to me your store looks emptier. You must have sold a pack of chewing gum.”

Ain’t much room in here, sure,” Joe would answer, with his slow grin, “except for you, Daise. Me and the store are waitin’ for you whenever you’ll take us. Don’t you think you might before long?”

“Store!”–a fine scorn was expressed by Daisy’s uptilted nose– “sardine box! Waitin’ for me, you say? Gee! you’d have to throw out about a hundred pounds of candy before I could get inside of it, Joe.”

“I wouldn’t mind an even swap like that,” said Joe, complimentary.

Daisy’s existence was limited in every way. She had to walk sideways between the counter and the shelves in the candy store. In her own hall bedroom coziness had been carried close to cohesiveness. The walls were so near to one another that the paper on them made a perfect Babel of noise. She could light the gas with one hand and close the door with the other without taking her eyes off the reflection of her brown pompadour in the mirror. She had Joe’s picture in a gilt frame on the dresser, and sometimes–but her next thought would always be of Joe’s funny little store tacked like a soap box to the corner of that great building, and away would go her sentiment in a breeze of laughter.

Daisy’s other suitor followed Joe by several months. He came to board in the house where she lived. His name was Dabster, and he was a philosopher. Though young, attainments stood out upon him like continental labels on a Passaic (N. J.) suit-case. Knowledge he had kidnapped from cyclopedias and handbooks of useful information; but as for wisdom, when she passed he was left sniffling in the road without so much as the number of her motor car. He could and would tell you the proportion of water and muscle-making properties of peas and veal, the shortest verse in the Bible, the number of pounds of shingle nails required to fasten 256 shingles laid four inches to the weather, the population of Kankakee, Ill., the theories of Spinoza, the name of Mr. H. McKay Twombly’s second hall footman, the length of the Hoosac Tunnel, the best time to set a hen, the salary of the railway post-office messenger between Driftwood and Red Bank Furnace, Pa., and the number of bones in the foreleg of a cat.

The weight of learning was no handicap to Dabster. His statistics were the sprigs of parsley with which he garnished the feast of small talk that he would set before you if he conceived that to be your taste. And again he used them as breastworks in foraging at the boardinghouse. Firing at you a volley of figures concerning the weight of a lineal foot of bar-iron 5 x 2 3/4 inches, and the average annual rainfall at Fort Snelling, Minn., he would transfix with his fork the best piece of chicken on the dish while you were trying to rally sufficiently to ask him weakly why does a hen cross the road.

Thus, brightly armed, and further equipped with a measure of good looks, of a hair-oily, shopping-district-at-three-in-the-afternoon kind, it seems that Joe, of the Lilliputian emporium, had a rival worthy of his steel.

But Joe carried no steel. There wouldn’t have been room in his store to draw it if he had.

One Saturday afternoon, about four o’clock, Daisy and Mr. Dabster stopped before Joe’s booth. Dabster wore a silk hat, and–well, Daisy was a woman, and that hat had no chance to get back in its box until Joe had seen it. A stick of pineapple chewing gum was the ostensible object of the call. Joe supplied it through the open side of his store. He did not pale or falter at sight of the hat.