Another man in evening clothes got on the car, and Milt saw that he wore a silk hat, and a white knitted scarf; that he took out and examined a pair of white kid gloves.
He'd forgotten the hat! He was wearing his gray felt. He could risk the gloves, but the hat—the "stovepipe"—and the chart had said to wear one—he was ruined——
He turned up the collar of his top-coat to conceal his white tie, tried to hide each of his feet behind the other to cover up his pumps; sought to change his expression from that of a superior person in evening clothes to that of a decent fellow in honest Regular Clothes. Had the conductor or any of the passengers realized that he was a dub in a dress-suit without the hat?
Once he thought that the real person in real evening clothes was looking at him. He turned his head and bore the probable insult in weak misery.
Too feeble for anything but thick suffering he was dragged on toward the theater, the opera, people in silk hats—toward Jeff Saxton and exposure.
But his success in bullying the tailor had taught him that dressing wasn't really a hidden lore to be known only by initiates; that some day he too might understand the black and white magic of clothes. His bruised self-consciousness healed. "I'll do—something," he determined. He waited, vacuously.
The Gilson party was not in the lobby when he arrived. He tore off his top-coat. He draped it over his felt hat, so that no one could be sure what sort of hat it shamefully concealed. That unveiling did expose him to the stare of everybody waiting in the lobby. He was convinced that the entire ticket-buying cue was glumly resenting him. Peeping down at the unusual white glare of his shirt-front, he felt naked and indecent.... "Nice kind o' vest. Must make 'em out of old piqué collars."
He endured his martyrdom till his party arrived—the Gilsons, Claire, Jeff Saxton, and a glittering young woman whose name, Milt thought, was Mrs. Corey.
And Saxton wasn't wearing a high hat! He wore a soft one, and he didn't seem to care!
Milt straightened up, followed them through the manifold dangers of the lobby, down a perilous aisle of uptilted scornful faces, to a red narrow corridor, winding stairs, a secret passage, a mysterious dark closet—and he walked out into a room with one side missing, and, on that side, ten trillion people in a well, and nine trillion of them staring at him and noticing that he'd rented his dress-suit. Hot about the neck, he stumbled over one or two chairs, and was permitted to rest in a foolish little gilt chair in the farthest corner.