“Where did the horror of it come in?� asked the other man.
“Under Shelmadine’s waistcoat,� said the man who had been addressed as Bonson. “Shelmadine was losing his figure, which had been his joy and pride and the delight of the female eye ever since he left Oxford, without his degree, and, thanks to the influence of his uncle, Colonel Sir Barberry Bigglesmith, K.C.B., Assistant Under-Secretary to the Ordnance Office Council, took up a Second Division Higher-grade Clerkship at £280 per annum, which sufficiently supplemented his younger son’s allowance of £500 to make it feasible to get along with some show of decency—don’t you follow me?�
“If I had followed this beggar down Upper Bond Street,� hinted the other man, knocking an ash off a long, slim High Dutch cigar, “where would he have led me?�
“Into his tailor’s,� said the man who had been addressed as Bonson promptly. “He walked in there regularly every day on his way to the War Office. Clothes were his passion—in fact, he simply couldn’t live without clothes!�
“Could we?� answered the other man simply.
“I have heard that Europeans shipwrecked on the palm-fringed shores of a Pacific Island,� said Bonson, “have managed to do very well without them. Under those circumstances, let me tell you, Shelmadine would still have managed to be well dressed. He would have evolved style out of cocoa-fiber and elegance out of banana-leaves, or he would have died in the attempt. I am trying to convey to you that he had a genius for clothes. He evolved ideas which sartorial artists were only too happy to carry out. He gave bootmakers hints which made their reputations. He would run over to Paris every month or so to look at Le Bargy’s hat and cravats. He never told anyone where he got his walking sticks, but they were wonderful. I tell you——�
“Every man likes to be well dressed,� said the man who was listening to the story, “but this beggar seems to have had coats and trousers on the brain.�
“Rather,� said the narrator. “He thought of clothes, dreamed of clothes—lived for clothes alone. Garments were his fad, his folly, his passion, his mania, his dearest object in life. Men consulted him—men who wanted to be particularly well got-up couldn’t do better than put themselves in Shelmadine’s hands. He permitted no servile copying of the modes and styles he exhibited on his person. ‘Forge my name,’ he said to a fellow once, ‘but never copy the knot of my necktie!’ Chap took the advice, and did forge his name—to the tune of £60. Shelmadine would not prosecute. He was planning an overcoat—a kind of Chesterfield, cut skirty—with which he made a sensation at Doncaster this year, and when a certain Distinguished Personage condescended to order one like it, Shelmadine made the three he had got, quite new, and wickedly expensive, into a parcel, poured on petrol, and applied a match. Shut himself up for three days, and appeared on the fourth with a perfectly new silhouette.�
“A perfectly new what?� said the listener, with circular eyes.
“Shelmadine’s creed was that for a man to look thoroughly well dressed he must have a perfect silhouette. Every line about him must be perfect. The sweep of the shoulders, the spring of the hips, the arch over the instep, and so forth, must display the cut of scissors wielded by an artist—not a mere workman. Now, on this particular morning, not so very long ago, it had been brought home to him, as he looked in his full-length, quadruple-leaved, swing-balance, double lever-action cheval glass, that the reflection it gave back to him was not quite satisfactory. His silhouette did not satisfy him. Then all at once came with a rush the overwhelming discovery that he was——�