And I would wear white linen collars every day, tie the ends of my tie even ... and each year would see a new book of mine out, published by some bookseller of repute ... and I could afford Red Seal records ... and have my largest room for a library....
Middle-class comfort was upon me ... good plumbing ... electric light ... laundry sent out ... no more washing of my one shirt overnight and hanging it up to dry on the back of a chair, while I slept ... and putting it on, next morning, crinkly and still damp.
I was already seduced, if there hadn't been that something in me which I myself could not control!
It was when I caught Mackworth on the streets of his town and in his newspaper office that I discovered the man himself.
In our country, especially in the Middle West, everybody watches everybody else for the least lapse in the democratic spirit.
Though he was truly democratic at heart, Mackworth laid it on in theatric outward appearance, in true line with the Kansas tradition of a sockless Jerry Simpson, who went without socks, as the adjective implies, and made Congress on that one platform of his sartorial lack ... of William Roscoe Stubbs, who rode into the office of governor partly on the fact that his daughter could make salt-rising bread ... a form of bread-making cultivated by the hardy pioneers of the state, and now no longer necessary.
Mackworth was "in-legged" ... that is, his legs on the insides rubbed together from the crotch to the knees ... and he wore old patches, hanging there actually in strips ... and, I think, had his trouser-seat patched, too ... and though he could have afforded a car, he drove about, he and his family, in a rickety old two-seated rig, deliberately kept, it seemed, in ill-repair ... and it was such an old ex-plow horse that dragged it about!
His fellow townsmen laughed, but they liked it. "Jarv's all right! No nonsense about Jarv, even ef he is one o' them lit'rary fellers!"
To call everybody by the first name—that was the last word in honest, democratic fellowship.