“It was kind of your father’s friend to offer him his old hat; don’t you think so?”
“Yes, very kind of him. But, you see, he had his reasons.”
“Of course, he did not want to be seen with anyone so badly dressed.”
“That is what he says in his letter to the Times. I copied that in the British Museum. He does not mention my father by name, he merely speaks of well-dressed Englishmen in Paris (by which he means people like himself) frequently seeing a respectable professional man disguised as an omnibus conductor or cab-driver and ‘being compelled to stand talking with a vulgar-looking object because they have unfortunately recognised an old acquaintance and not had time to run across the road to avoid him.’ My father, no doubt, thought of Mr. Unthank’s conversations with him at Como and Milan and said to himself, ‘That’s me.’ The cap fitted him and he put it on.”
“Excuse me; your father cannot have put the cap on, he says he had to leave Milan too soon for that.”
“O my dear Buffo, I am so sorry. When I said the cap, I did not mean the wideawake, I was only using an English idiom.”
“I see, I understand. We also have a similar expression, but it is not about hats, it is about boots, I think, or coats. I will find out and tell you.”
“My father does not say he ‘had to leave’; he only says he left; and my mother, who agreed with his friends and thought his taste in dress deplorable, believed that he ran away to escape from Mr. Unthank’s hat.”
“Oh! but a hat is always worth something. I should have waited for the hat. Was it really a very bad one?”
“I do not remember it, I should think it must have been pretty bad. The dressing-gown was awful. It was maroon, and his friends called it his wife’s mantle. After he left off wearing it, it was given to us children for dressing up. It was no use for anything else and it was not much use for that. So you see, Buffo, you need not trouble about your clothes if you want to appear English. You do not look in the least like a cab-driver.”