The Lesson

Many of the toys in the Fifth Avenue toy store are so expensive, and so seemingly useless and decorative, that they are easy for the narrator to dismiss. She finds a $480 paperweight to be strange and ugly, and a $1,000 sailboat to be, while undeniably beautiful, more of an ornament than a toy. The narrator understands intuitively that the true purpose of these items is not one of amusement but rather to project power and status. They are ultimately more for adults than for children, and their outrageous expensiveness is their entire point. 

At the same time, the opulence and exclusivity of the store confuses the narrator, as it does the other children on the excursion. While the narrator and the other children are verbal and animated outside of the store, pointing out different items in the windows to one another, they fall into a cowed silence—one that the narrator compares to the hush of a church service—upon entering the store. Even though the narrator finds individual items in the store to be merely strange and ridiculous, there is something about the atmosphere of the store that she, and the other children, are unable to dismiss.