“It is perilous to health, too. You see our ladies gadding about in the bitterest weather with their necks uncovered, while gentlemen shiver under their great coats with five or six capes and heavy stocks and mufflers besides.
“But the men are hardly more modest. This new fashion of—dare I refer to it?—of buttoning the pantaloons down the front instead of on the sides! It is astounding. One or two sermons have already been preached against it and I think I shall refer to it myself next Sabbath. Pardon me!”
There was a respite while he took out his pocketbook and made a note of this urgent matter. RoBards remembered his own memorandum that a man may smile and be a rake as well. He could hardly keep from plucking at the parson’s sleeve and confessing:
“When you are in your pulpit, cry out also that one of the town’s pets, the popular Harry Chalender, has ruined the good name of my wife and our children and stained the old RoBards mansion with the wreckage of the Seventh Thou-shalt-not!”
But Dr. Chirnside was putting up his pencil and putting forth his lean, cold hand for a farewell clasp. The stage was nearing City Hall Park and he must get out his fare and get down at his parsonage.
And a little further below was the Astor House, which RoBards must call home henceforth.
Dr. Chirnside had referred for his “thirteenthly” to the barbaric luxury of the new hotel, and to the evil influence of such hostelries on home-life. It had a bathtub on every floor! What Oriental luxury would come next? In many of the more religious states bathing was a misdemeanor, but in New York every crime flourished—and every slothfulness. The modern woman, unlike her mother, was too shiftless to care for her own household or even to oversee her servants: she preferred to live in a hotel and have more time and convenience for her idle mischiefs.
But RoBards mused dismally that his home had gone to wrack and ruin first, and that the hotel was his only refuge.
CHAPTER XV
The sumptuousness of the Astor House only emphasized RoBards’ exile. From his window he would look down upon the seething throngs along Broadway, the tall beavers of the men and the poke bonnets of the women bobbing along as on a stream.