Obediently the next day he went to a tailor—recommended by Clive, who seemed heartily to approve of this particular surrender to convention—and was measured for a dinner coat, and a new loose-fitting suit of brown homespun selected by Rose-Ann.
He found he did not mind the idea of wearing evening clothes after all. He only wished that—well, that he was going to pay for them himself!
XXII. Mainly About Clothes
1
AND still they found no place to live, and their week at the St. Dunstan became as second, and a third.
They went together to look at dozens of apartments. Rose-Ann was observantly critical of their good and bad features, and yet extremely complaisant; he felt that she would have agreed to anything he wanted. But he had not forgotten her fierce discontent at “ordinary” apartments, and he was looking for something that would really please her. He felt that he had not found it yet....
And no one at the St. Dunstan had objected to the noise of their typewriter on occasional evenings. They could have breakfast brought up and set down on a tray at their bedside, a breakfast of cool grapefruit and elaborately disguised eggs and coffee with cream, and linger over their last sip of coffee and a final cigarette before dressing lazily; and Felix could stroll into the office at ten o’clock, like Hawkins—a free man and not a hurried, anxious slave.
Felix had at first felt a little guilty about these late appearances, when everybody else had been at work for hours; but it was apparently expected of him that he would take due advantage of the opportunities for leisure that the position gave. So long as he did his work, it did not matter when he came or went; Hawkins himself did not show up every day—and there was that god-like being, the literary editor, McQuish, he who had taught the Chicago intelligentsia to speak of their “reactions” and of being “intrigued”: he fulminated his Wednesday critiques locked in his office on Tuesday afternoon and except for his Tuesday arrival and departure was never seen around the place at all!
Felix’s new loose-fitting homespun clothes, with their air of having been worn in to town from a country-club, helped Felix to feel the rightful possessor of this leisure, and to assume its proper air. Silk shirts with soft collars, and Windsor ties, bought by Rose-Ann, and approved by Clive, helped still more.