Of course when you had bought a few shirts at twelve dollars a throw, a dressing gown at forty, and silk pajamas at $15 came real natural.
Did I ever tell you how a necktie cost me $150? Well I will, before the super. comes in and tells me there's a new strike in the stitching room.
I was nineteen, and had been clerking for three years in Jed Barrow's store. Jed was so busy putting sand in the sugar, and mixing his Java with a high grade of chicory, he didn't have much time to think of advancing my wages, but I was careful, I had to be, and at the end of three years I had saved $178. I never have forgotten the exact figures, because it came so blamed hard.
There, one day, Jed suggested I take a week's vacation. I think he was afraid I was going to ask for a raise, and did it to get me out of the way, but as my Uncle Ezra had invited me to visit him in Boston I took my week, without pay, and hiked to the big town.
Uncle Ezra was the aristocrat of the family. He lived in one of those old yellow brick houses on Beacon Hill just across from the common, the kind with the lavender glass in the downstairs windows, and if the old man hadn't been so busy being an aristocrat, he'd have made a first-rate radical, for he was continually writing letters to the Transcript complaining about everything as it was.
Uncle Ezra greeted me cordially enough, until he caught sight of my necktie which I'll admit was somewhat bewhiskered and more green than black.
"My boy, what an awful tie!" he exclaimed.