"Now," says the housewife, "I must at least have a parlor-carpet. We
must get that to begin with, and other things as we go on." She goes
to a store to look at carpets. The clerks are smiling and obliging,
and sweetly complacent. The storekeeper, perhaps, is a neighbor or a
friend, and after exhibiting various patterns, he tells her of a
Brussels carpet he is selling wonderfully cheap--actually a dollar
and a quarter less a yard than the usual price of Brussels, and the
reason is that it is an unfashionable pattern, and he has a good deal
of it, and wishes to close it off.
She looks at it and thinks it is not at all the kind of carpet she
meant to buy, but then it is Brussels, and so cheap! And as she
hesitates, her friend tells her that she will find it "cheapest in the
end--that one Brussels carpet will outlast three or four ingrains,"
etc., etc.
The result of all this is, that she buys the Brussels carpet, which,
with all its reduction in price, is one third dearer than the ingrain
would have been, and not half so pretty. When she comes home, she will
find that she has spent, we will say eighty dollars, for a very homely
carpet whose greatest merit it is an affliction to remember--namely,
that it will outlast three ordinary carpets.
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