"And I haven't got an evening coat with tails."
"Well, get one. If you look as well in it as you do in your dinner-jacket outfit—and you'd better have a white waistcoat, a silk hat, and a pair of white gloves. What'll happen to you when you get there you can leave to me. Now that I know you look so well, and dance so well, you'll give me no trouble at all."
Her kindness humbled him. He felt the necessity of taking it as kindness and nothing more. Knowing too that he must school his own emotions to a sense of gratitude, he imagined that he so schooled them.
With the five hundred dollars he had earned through the summer added to what remained of Honey's legacy, he had enough for his current year at Harvard, with a margin over. The tailed evening coat, the white waistcoat, the silk hat, the gloves, he looked upon as an investment. He went to the ball.
It was given at the Shawmut, the new hotel with a specialty in this sort of entertainment. The ballroom had been specially designed so as to afford a spectacle. A circular cup, surrounded by a pillared gallery for chaperons and couples preferring to "sit out," you descended into it by one of four broad shallow staircases, whence the coup d'oeil was superb.
By being more or less passive, he got through the evening better than he had expected. Knowing scarcely anyone, he fell back on his formula.
"I mustn't be conscious of it. I must take not knowing anyone for granted, as I should if I were in a crowd at a theater, or the lobby of this hotel. If I feel like a stray cat I shall look like a stray cat. If I feel at ease I shall look at ease."
In this he was supported by the knowledge of wearing the right thing. Even Guy, whom he had met for a minute in the cloakroom, had been surprised into a compliment.
"Gee whiz! Who do you think you are? The old lady's been afraid you'd look like an outsider. Now she'll be struck silly. Lot of girls here that you'll put their eye out."