It pleased me also to dwell upon the fact that the moment of my capitulation had been made glorious by a meeting with Stanley and Hardy and Barrie, and that the dinner which marked this most important change in lifelong habits of dress was appropriately notable. That several hundred of the best known men and women of England had witnessed my fall softened the shock, and when—on the way out—Zangwill nudged my elbow and said, "Cow-boy, you wore 'em to the manner born," I smiled in lofty disregard of future comment. I faced Chicago and New York with serene and confident composure.
Although I carried this suit with me to Bernard Shaw's (on a week-end visit), I was not called upon to wear it, for he met me in snuff-colored knickerbockers and did not change to any other suit during my stay. Sunday dinner at Conan Doyle's was a midday meal, and Barrie and Hardy and other of my literary friends I met at teas or luncheons. I took my newly-acquired uniform to Paris but as my meetings with my French friends were either teas or lunches, it so happened that—eager as I was to display it I did not put this suit on till after I reached home. My first appearance in it was in the nature of a masquerade, my second was by way of a joke to please my mother.
Knowing that she had never seen a man in evening dress I arrayed myself, one night, as if for a banquet, and suddenly descended upon her with intent to surprise and amuse her. I surprised her but I did not make her laugh in the way I had expected. On the contrary she surveyed me with a look of pride and then quietly remarked, "I like you in it. I wouldn't mind if you dressed that way every day."
This finished my opposition to the swallow-tail coat. If my mother, the daughter of a pioneer, a woman of the farm, accepted it as something appropriate to her son, its ultimate acceptance by all America was inevitable. Thereafter I lay in wait for an opportunity to display myself in all my London finery.
* * * * * *
Two months later as I was mounting the central staircase of the Chicago Art Institute, on my way to the Annual Reception, I met two of my fellow republicans in Prince Albert Frock suits. At sight of me they started with surprise—surprise and sorrow—exclaiming, "Look at Hamlin Garland!" Assuming an expression of patrician ease, I replied, "Oh, yes, I have conformed. In London one must conform, you know.—The English are quite inexorable in all matters of dress, you understand."
Howells, when I saw him next, smilingly listened to my tale and heartily approved of my action, but Burroughs regarded it as a weak surrender. "A silk hat and steel-pen coat on a Whitman Democrat," he said, "seems like a make-believe," which, in a sense, it was.
CHAPTER EIGHT