I sought to dress like a genteel American, my favorite color for clothes and hats being (and still is) dark brown. It became my dark hair well, I thought. The difference between taste and vulgar ostentation was coming slowly, but surely, I hope. I remember the passionate efforts I made to learn to tie a four-in-hand cravat, then a recent invention. I was forever watching and striving to imitate the dress and the ways of the well-bred American merchants with whom I was, or trying to be, thrown. All this, I felt, was an essential element in achieving business success; but the ambition to act and look like a gentleman grew in me quite apart from these motives
Now, Dora seemed to notice these things in me, and to like them. So I would parade my newly acquired manners before her as I did my neckties or my English vocabulary.
After that lecture I gave her on adverbs she no longer called my English in question. To be educated and an "American lady" had, thanks to Lucy's influence, become the great passion of her life. It almost amounted to an obsession. She thought me educated and a good deal of an American, so she looked up to me and would listen to my harangues reverently.
CHAPTER X
ONE Saturday evening she said to me: "Lord! you are so educated. I wish I had a head like yours."
"Why, you have an excellent head, Dora," I replied. "You have no reason to complain."
She sighed
"I wish I had not gone into business," I resumed
I had already told her, more than once, in fact, how I had been about to enter college when an accident had led me astray; so I now referred to those events, dwelling regretfully upon the sudden change I had made in my life plans
"It was the devil that put it in my head to become a manufacturer," I said, bitterly, yet with relish in the "manufacturer." "Well, one can be a manufacturer and educated man at the same time," she consoled me