It was quite simple to say that, and it was quite simple to make an appointment at the photographer’s, but it was another matter to provide an escort for him. Mrs. Brown happened to have a bad cold; Mr. Brown was at the office; Robert, William’s grown-up brother, flatly refused to go with him. So, after a conversation that lasted almost an hour, William’s elder sister Ethel was induced, mainly by bribery and corruption, to go with William to the photographer’s. But she took a friend with her to act as a buffer state.
William, at the appointed hour, was in a state of suppressed fury. To William the lowest depth of humiliation was having his photograph taken. Mrs. Brown had expended much honest toil upon him. He had been washed and brushed and combed and manicured till his spirits had sunk below zero. To William, complete cleanliness was quite incompatible with happiness. He had been encased in his “best suit”—a thing of hard, unbending cloth; with that horror of horrors, a stiff collar.
“Won’t a jersey do?” he had asked plaintively. “It’ll probably make me ill—give me a sort throat or somethin’—this tight thing at my neck, an’ I wouldn’t like to be ill—’cause of giving you trouble,” he ended piously.
Mrs. Brown was touched—she was the one being in the world who never lost faith in William.
“But you wear it every Sunday, dear,” she protested.
“Sundays is different,” he said. “Everyone wears silly things on Sundays—but, but s’pose I met someone on my way there.” His horror was pathetic.
“Well, you look very nice, dear. Where are your gloves.”
“Gloves?” he said indignantly.
“Yes—to keep your hands clean till you get there.”
“Is anyone goin’ to give me anythin’ for doin’ all this?”