The evening meal—an excellent one, to which Mr. Cornell did ample justice—was over. Father and mother, as was their custom, had visited the nursery in company, heard the children’s prayers, and kissed them “good-night.” The orderly household had settled down into cheerful quiet that fell like dew upon weary nerves. Susie went to the piano presently and played a pensive nocturne, then sang softly a couple of Arthur’s favorite ballads. The night was blustering, and in the silence succeeding the music, the wedded pair, seated before the soft-coal fire in the back parlor, heard the hurrying tread of passers-by echoing sharply from the frozen stones.
Arthur ended the restful pause. His choice of a theme and the lightness of his tone were heroic.
“Low neck and short sleeves for me to-morrow night, I suppose, old lady? That is to say, claw-hammer, and low-cut vest. It’s lucky I had them made for Lou Wilson’s wedding last winter. There wouldn’t be time to get up the proper rig, and regrets based upon ‘No dress-coat’ would be rather awkward.”
“Decidedly! No man of whatever age should be without one,” rejoined the nascent fashionist. “Some men never sit down to dinner except in evening dress. It must be very nice to live in that way. I like such graceful ceremony in everyday customs.”
Arthur cast about for something neater to say than the dismayed ejaculation bitten off just in time.
“It must help a fellow to feel altogether at his ease in his company accouterments”—inspiration coming in the nick of time. “Most men look, and, judging by myself, feel like newly imported restaurant waiters when decked out in their swallow-tails.”
The conventional “dress coat” is a shrewd test of innate gentlehood. A thoroughbred is never more truly one than when thus appareled. The best it can do for the plebeian, who would prefer to eat his dinner in his shirt-sleeves, is to bring him up to the level of a hotel waiter.
Arthur looked like an unassuming gentleman on the following evening, when he joined his wife below-stairs. If he had not an air of fashion, he had not a touch of the vulgarian. Susie’s mien was, as he assured her, that of a queen. Her head was set well above a pair of graceful shoulders, she carried herself and managed her train cleverly. Arthur had brought her a cluster of pink roses, all of which she wore in her corsage except one bud which she pinned in his buttonhole. He put a careful finger under her chin, and lifted her face to let the full light of the chandelier rain upon it.
“It would have been a pity to keep you all to myself to-night,” he said.
The weather was raw, with menace of rain or snow, but neither of them thought of the extravagance of a carriage. As she had done upon previous festal occasions, the wife looped up the trailing breadths of velvet, and secured them into a “walking length” of skirt with safety pins. Over her gala attire she cast a voluminous waterproof, buttoned all the way down the front. A bonnet would have deranged her coiffure, and she wore, instead, a black Spanish lace scarf knotted under her chin. Slippers and light gloves went in a reticule slung upon her arm.