The blonde girl moved off out of sight; Rhoda went back to her book and tried to lose herself in it. She couldn’t.

She got up from the bench and went back to her room.

That night there was no dream. She slept soundly and woke easily, vitally anxious to begin the day. She had breakfast, and hurried to the shop. Nothing very much happened during the morning, but the time seemed to pass quickly anyway.

A few minutes after two that afternoon she sold a black lacquered commode for $79.95. The customer, a heavyish woman with bleached hair, paid cash for the commode and left delivery instructions. She lived somewhere on Long Island. When she had left the store, Mr. Yamatari danced out of the back room with an expression of glee on his face that was not inscrutable in the least.

“You sell it,” he said. “You sell that thing. You wonderful.”

“Well,” she said.

“Never think we sell it,” Mr. Yamatari said. “Cost…what? Sixteen dollar, fifty cent. Three year ago. Never think we sell the damn thing, and you sell it.”

She hadn’t exactly. The woman with the bleached hair had come in looking for some overpriced and foul object, poorly constructed and shabbily designed, and it had taken no special genius to guess that the black lacquered commode was just what she was searching for. From that point, the commode had sold itself.

“You get ten dollar extra this week,” Mr. Yamatari said expansively. “Ten dollar, no tax.”

That fixed her mood for the rest of the afternoon. She nearly sang as she moved around the shop. Customers who might have annoyed her did not get on her nerves, and when one woman’s young son smashed a china Buddha to smithereens she insisted that the woman forget the whole thing, that it was perfectly all right.