Mind you, it was a swagger garment in its way. In addition to the fur collar it had a double-breasted front, and was fastened with barrel-shaped arrangements instead of buttons. It had everything pertaining to a fur-lined coat, except the fur-lining.
Of course, you wouldn't notice that vital defect unless we opened the coat or took it off. And we never did either in public. We have sat in street-cars up near the stove with that coat buttoned up to our chin, until people have moved away from us under the impression that we had the measles. We have almost had to thrash butlers to prevent them helping us off with it—if there is anything obstinate on earth, it is a butler with the idea that you are hiding something from him. We have even retired into dark doorways to get a cent out of our pants-pocket to buy a paper, rather than open the coat on a busy corner.
In spite of these precautions, we always had the feeling that people knew about that coat and discussed it. They had a way of looking at it as though they thought the collar had been put on with safety-pins. We grew to hate the coat. Finally the moths got it. That is, they bored holes in it—probably looking for the lining.
Still our thwarted ambition to possess a real fur-lined coat has persisted. We want it as badly as we ever did. It is nothing to us that they have gone out of exclusive style. We care not that every second man on the street has a coat with some sort of hairy stuff on the collar and the interior draped with the mortal remains of the commoner sort of muskrat. We are still faithful to our early love.
From time to time we have gone into one or other of the various local emporiums—or should it be "emporia?"—of skins, peltry, fleece, hides, and fur, and have priced the garment of our longing. We have looked at mink-lined ones, rat-lined, rabbit-lined, and even seal-lined. We have tried them on and talked sagely to salesmen about them. But we have bought not, neither have we paid down in instalments. We have sighed, jingled the quarter against the small change in our pocket, and said we would call again soon.
The trouble is that the only coats we like are those ranging from about four hundred up—up as far as you can see, and then some! The seal ones we definitely gave up. No one but a former manufacturer of munitions or an inventor of booze-substitutes should aspire to those. It isn't only the initial expense but the way you have to live up to them—taxicabs, diamonds, and half a dollar to the hat-boy every time he helps you on with it.
That left mink, and mink we resolved it should be, in spite of its scarcity. You see, the mink is a small animal of retiring nature and celibate instincts. At least, the mink does not seem to run to large families. The rabbit takes up fatherhood as a profession—but nothing like that for the mink! One or two little minks, and that's all. The mink is a sort of natural Eugenist. "Better babies" is his slogan, not "More babies." As a result minks are hard to get, and correspondingly expensive.
Frequently have we cast eyes of longing on mink-lined coats in fur-store windows, as we strolled along to the office on cold mornings in our combination raincoat and winter ulster. They have been handsome coats, too, many of them, but there has always been something about them we didn't like—sometimes the collar, occasionally the shell (how those military terms will creep in even yet!), and nearly always the small tag hanging from the upper righthand button-hole and proclaiming the price.
But one fine day during that very cold snap we finally saw the fur-coat of our youthful vision. There it hung, or rather stood, in the window, spreading its mink lining to the ravished gaze and ruffling its otter collar in tantalizing beauty. That collar had been peeled off the emperor of all the otters—or the crown prince, at the very least—and Heaven alone knows how many minks had delivered up their fluffy integument to furnish forth that sumptuous lining.
It was a beautiful thing, God wot, and the price was right—only two hundred and fifty iron men, simoleons, bucks, bones, or spondulicks. Not that we take a light view of a sum which in the old days would have bought two thousand cocktails, and if judiciously expended on "lush" would have enabled one to laugh at Prohibition for many happy weeks. But what is two hundred and fifty dollars for a fur-coat which was originally five hundred as the tag explicitly declared, and had come down through successive stages to this absurdly inadequate figure?