By degrees he brought himself erect and slowly, dazedly performed an act which had never before been perpetrated within his establishment.

It was not that he deliberated, nor that his reason dictated it; but instinctively, almost from a purely reflex muscular action, he removed his hat while Miss Caroline talked, feeling himself thrill with a foreign and most suave deference.

It was customary in our town to raise your hat to a lady on the street; but for a merchant, and a solid citizen at that, to do this thing in his own establishment, was a thing unheard of--and a thing of pretentious and sickening foppery when it _was_ heard of, for that matter, though this need not now concern us.
"And be sure to tell my servant to give you a glass of wine when your work is done," concluded Miss Caroline, as she turned to rustle silkily out.

Whereat Chester Pierce, charter member and President of our Sons of Temperance, a man primed with all statistics of the woe resulting traditionally from that first careless glass, murmured words unintelligible but of gratified import, and bowed low after the retreating vision.

A moment later he was staring with mystified absorption at the hat in his hands, quite as if the hat were a stranger's--and then he brushed it around and around with the cuff of his coat sleeve as if the stranger had not been careful enough of it.
Thence paraded Miss Caroline to the City Drug Store, to be bowed well out to the sidewalk by young Arthur Updyke when her errand within had been done.