"It isn't that at all, Fred. I agree with you that we can't afford it this year."
"Is it the extra tub in the laundry, then?"
"Of course it would be very nice if we could have an extra tub. But it isn't that."
"Then there is something?"
"Yes," she murmured. "Oh, Fred, I do hope, now that the doctor has ordered you to take more exercise, you will get one of those pretty, striped, tennis suits."
"Yes, do, father dear," exclaimed my eldest daughter, who happened to enter the room at the moment and overheard her mother's speech. "You would look perfectly lovely in one."
"It would be a satisfaction for once to see you wear something a little joyous," continued my wife, emboldened by the enthusiasm of her offspring.
"You seem to forget, dear, that I am a plain man," I answered, though to tell the truth I was asking myself whether I was not a trifle weary of posing in that sublime capacity. Now that I thought of it, what was the especial virtue of being a plain citizen?
When I came to reflect on the matter further, I realized that my programme for the past fifteen years has been to put on a plain pepper-and-salt suit of modest demeanor in the morning, eat two plain-boiled eggs for breakfast, walk down town in a plain black overcoat to my office in a plain-looking building, where I pursue my calling until it is time to go home and doff my pepper-and-salt of modest demeanor for a plain suit of sables, the funereal dress-clothes of commerce and convention. Even this coal-black tribute to ceremony has discredited me with some, who argue that I am not a plain man because I do not prefer to dine in the same old pepper-and-salt. Verily the only bits of warm color in my wardrobe have been a robin's-egg-blue neck-tie, which I have never dared to wear except once at a wedding, and a pair of pajamas reserved for very occasional jaunts on yachts and sleeping cars. And now that I had the doctor's orders to take more exercise, I had been on the point of selecting an ordinary, plain, pepper-and-salt flannel shirt, and condemning one of my oldest and plainest pairs of pepper-and-salt trousers for the purpose.
And yet it was not always so. I remember that when I was a young fellow and a bachelor I used to be, if not a dandy exactly, very particular regarding my personal appearance, and that I was willing to approach the border line of gaudiness as closely as any of my contemporaries. It took courage, too, then: the youth who wore down town even a garden flower in his button-hole was liable to be suspected of a lack of purpose. One got very little encouragement at the best in any effort to fly in the face of the perpetual black tie and black broadcloth frock-coat of the plain American citizen, and he who chose not to wear the garb of the Republic not merely cut himself off from the possibility of ever becoming President, but ran the risk of being refused employment of any kind. Naturally, therefore, I began after I was married to do pretty much as the rest of my fellow-citizens did, save in the matter of a dress-coat at dinner, which I continued to don daily out of respect to Josephine's feelings. (This has been one of the few points in my behavior upon which she has ever laid particular stress, and I thank her here publicly for her pertinacity. It has saved me from the slough of utter carelessness.) Barring the single blue necktie and the pajamas, I drifted into and have stuck to blacks and browns and the least ostentatious cuts until my own wife and children have felt called upon to proclaim me fusty.