"I hear, Mr. Miller," I said, "that you are my compatriot—that you are a Hoosier by birth, as I am—is it true?"
He sat in meditation for a time; then he said:
"George, I've told so many lies about my birth and all that, that there may be inconsistencies in them. I think I'd better not add to the inconsistencies."
I did not press the question. I asked him, instead, to let me have a poem for Hearth and Home.
Joaquin Miller's Notions of Dress
"I can't," he replied, "I haven't a line of unsold manuscript anywhere on earth, and just now I am devoting myself to horseback riding in Central Park. I've got a seven hundred dollar saddle and I must use it, and you, as an old cavalryman, know how utterly uninspiring a thing it is to amble around Central Park on a horse trained to regard a policeman as a person to be respected, not to say feared, in the matter of speed limits and the proper side of the trail, and all that sort of thing. But that saddle and these boots must be put to the use for which they were built, so I must go on riding in the park till they grow shabby, and I can't think in meter till I get away somewhere where the trees don't stand in rows like sentinels in front of a string of tents, and where the people don't all dress alike. Do you know that is the worst tomfoolery this idiotic world ever gave birth to? It is all right for British soldiers, because there must be some way in which the officers can tell in a crowd who is a soldier and who is not, and besides, regular soldiers aren't men anyhow. They're only ten-pins, to be set up in regular order by one man and bowled over by another.
"But what sense is there in men dressing in that way? You and I are tall and slender, but our complexions are different. We are free American citizens. Why should anybody who invites us both to dinner, expect that we shall wear the same sort of clothes? And not only that, why should they expect us to put on precisely the same sort of garments that the big-bellied banker, who is to be our fellow-guest, is sure to wear? It's all nonsense, I tell you. It is an idea born of the uninventive genius of an inane society whose constituent members are as badly scared at any suggestion of originality or individuality as a woman is at the apparition of a mouse in her bedchamber."
I told him I did not agree with him.
"The social rule in that respect seems to me a peculiarly sensible and convenient one," I said. "When a man is invited to anything, he knows exactly what to wear. If it be a daytime affair he has only to put on a frock coat with trousers of a lighter color; if it be an evening function a sparrowtailed coat, black trousers, a low cut vest, and a white tie equip him as perfectly as a dozen tailors could. In either case he need not give a thought to his clothes in order to be sure that his costume will be not only correct but so exactly like everybody's else that nobody present will think of it at all. It is a great saving of gray matter, and of money, too, and more important still, it sets men free. The great majority of us couldn't afford to go to any sort of function, however interesting, if we had to dress individually and competitively for it, as women do."
"Oh, of course," he answered, "the thing has its advantages, but it is dreadfully monotonous—what the children call 'samey, samey.'"