Our dress shirt is sent to the laundry so as to have it fresh for the occasion, and a day or two before the event hubby gets into the spirit of the game, and at the earnest solicitation of the female portion of the house, submits to a dress rehearsal to make sure that shirt, studs, special collar, tie and all the toggery appertaining to the deal will be in order at the last moment prior to the final plunge.
Now our English cousin's familiarity with the dress-suit breeds contempt—that is, contempt for any exhilaration incident to getting into the thing on state occasions.
While it is not a criminal offense not to dress for dinner, it is something in the nature of a misdemeanor, and a rigid rule prescribes the dress-suit for dinner.
Nowhere on earth is this rigid rule more thoroughly observed than on the P. & O.
I was not a stranger to this rule—the P. & O. and I are not strangers. Nor am I a stranger to the customs of the Far East.
As the years have gone by I have added to the dress shirt a sufficient number to take care of the situations one meets with on world tours.
When I got to Bombay I found that the strenuous dobes had practically annihilated all but one of my dress shirts, so I presented those wrecked shirts to Lal, along with my bedding purchased in Calcutta, for which I had no further use, to take back to Calcutta with him.
If Mark Twain were alive today I'd be willing to bet him dollars to doughnuts that the dobes had succeeded in breaking stones clear across India with my dress shirts.
I had many things to do to get ready to sail on this ship, and one would have been enough—that consular invoice.
To lay in a bale of dress shirts was one of the items that should have been attended to, as I knew I was in for a twenty-two days' sail on a P. & O. to London; if all went well after boarding her.