In my room I found young George Bolingbroke, who had been waiting, as he at once informed me, "a good half an hour."
"I say, Ben," he broke out the next minute, "why don't you get the housemaid to tie your cravats? She'd do it a long sight better. Are your fingers all thumbs?"
"They must be," I replied with a humility I had never assumed before the General, "I can't do the thing properly to save my life."
"I wonder it doesn't give you a common look," he remarked dispassionately, while I winced at the word, "but somehow it only makes you appear superior to such trifles, like a giant gazing over molehills at a mountain. It's your size, I reckon, but you're the kind of chap who can put on a turned-down collar with your evening clothes, or a tie that's been twisted through a wringer, and not look ridiculous. It's the rest of us that seem fops because we're properly dressed."
"I'd prefer to wear the right thing, you know," I returned, crestfallen.
"You never will. Anybody might as well expect a mountain to put forth rose-bushes instead of pine. It suits you, somehow, like your hair, which would make the rest of us look a regular guy. But I'm forgetting my mission. I've brought you an invitation to a party."
"What on earth should I do at a party?"
"Look pleasant. Did I take you to Miss Lessie Bell's dancing class for nothing? and were you put through the steps of the Highland Fling in vain?"
"I wasn't put through, I never learned."
"Well, you kicked at it anyway. I say, is all your pirouetting to be done with stocks? Are you going to pass away in ignorance of polite society and the manners of the ladies?"