A few days later Bond called at Abner's old address and was referred by a grieved landlady to his new one. "I don't make out Mr. Joyce," said poor, hurt Mrs. Cole.
Bond went down the steps whistling, "They're after me, they're after me!" in a thoughtful undertone.
XVI
"Are you going to dress very much?" grimaced Giles, with a precious little intonation that caused Bond to laugh outright.
Abner, who was lounging under the Turkish canopy, pricked up his ears to catch the reply. Medora tossed aside one of her brother's sketches and turned her eyes on Abner.
"I don't know what to do," replied Bond. "We have had such a glut of Romeos and Mephistos and cowboys. It has occurred to me that I might go as a rough sketch—a bozzetto—of a gentleman."
"How would you get yourself up for that?" asked Giles.
"Just as you have often seen me. I should wear that old dress-suit with the shiny seams and the frayed facings, and a shirt-front seen more recently by the world than by the laundry, and a pair of shoes already quite familiar with tweeds and cheviots, and a little black bow—this last as a sort of sign that I am not fully in society, or if I am, only briefly at long, uncertain intervals. And a black Derby hat—or possibly a brown one."
Medora smiled, well pleased. This easy, jocular treatment of a serious and formal subject was just what she wanted. It would help show the listening Abner that the wearing of the social uniform was nothing very formidable after all, and did not necessarily doom one's moral and spiritual fibre to utter blight and ruin.
Abner set his lips. He might indeed go to their wretched "fandango" in the end—they had all been urging him, Stephen, Medora, everybody—but never as a cheap imitation of a swell so long as his own good, neat, well-made, every-day wardrobe existed as it was. He had turned down the wine-glass at Whyland's, and he would turn down the dress-coat here.