The Curious Quest by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Bliss, in his first unsuccessful efforts to sell the Alpha Cooking Stove, wore out a pair of shoes and spent twenty-six of the most miserable days of his life. He, who had been the spoilt darling of servile commissionaires, of theatrical door-keepers, restaurant pages, and obsequious _maitres d'hôtel, _ was snubbed vigorously by small boys who looked at him through half-opened wicket holes and kept waiting for hours in draughty passages by inattentive clerks, only to have his card brought back from the buyer of some furnishing department, with a message more or less covertly insolent. He was at divers times informed, when he got a hearing at all, that his particular stove was the worst, the dearest, and the most out-of-date of all stoves that ever cumbered the ground. His face grew a little harder day by day. Distaste of this new career upon which he had entered, half in a spirit of bravado and half with a real though fleeting enthusiasm, deepened with his lack of success. His knees began to tremble, no longer from nervousness, but from actual weakness. He slept in a cheap lodging on the topmost floor of a house in a dingy neighbourhood, and he ate cheap food. He lived on his weekly two pounds, which he accepted after his fruitless labours with a groan; and each evening when he returned to the little warehouse in Fore Street to make his report, he went through a sort of purgatory.

The moment his foot crossed the threshold, it began. The warehouseman, who was generally-engaged in polishing the model stove, stopped his work and looked at him expectantly. Mr. Masters always met him at the office door. His stereotyped question was delivered with an eagerness which it had become daily more hard to conceal.