“I have some of my own, thank you.”
“Give you a light?”
The metropolitan worldling struck a match and held it up. This was on the order of strategy. He wished to see Banneker’s face. To his relief it did not look angry or even stern. Rather, it appeared thoughtful. Banneker was considering impartially the matter of his apparel.
“What is the matter with my clothes?” he asked.
“Why—well,” began Wickert, unhappy and fumbling with his ideas; “Oh, they’re all right.”
“For a meeting of the Farmers’ Alliance.” Banneker was smiling good-naturedly. “But for the East?”
“Well, if you really want to know,” began Wickert doubtfully. “If you won’t get sore—” Banneker nodded his assurance. “Well, they’re jay. No style. No snap. Respectable, and that lets ’em out.”
“They don’t look as if they were made in New York or for New York?”
Young Mr. Wickert apportioned his voice equitably between a laugh and a snort. “No: nor in Hoboken!” he retorted. “Listen, ‘bo,” he added, after a moment’s thought. “You got to have a smooth shell in Nuh Yawk. The human eye only sees the surface. Get me? And it judges by the surface.” He smoothed his hands down his dapper trunk with ineffable complacency. “Thirty-eight dollars, this. Bernholz Brothers, around on Broadway. Look it over. That’s a cut!”
“Is that how they’re making them in the East?” doubtfully asked the neophyte, reflecting that the pinched-in snugness of the coat, and the flare effect of the skirts, while unquestionably more impressive than his own box-like garb, still lacked something of the quiet distinction which he recalled in the clothes of Herbert Cressey. The thought of that willing messenger set him to groping for another sartorial name. He hardly heard Wickert say proudly: