“All the more shame on you not dressing like a gentleman. Look at those boots; I am sure your mother did not buy them for you. Take them off at once, sir—and put on your proper ones.”
“Aren’t they—isn’t it the thing, the form, you know, for—”
“Form! Fiddlesticks. The thing at Low Heath is to behave and dress like gentlemen, not like vulgar, public-house potmen,” said she, with an access of indignation which surprised me. “To think that you, with a nice mother like yours, should come up here a fright like that! There, put the shoes and hat in the trunk with the speckled waistcoat and shirts, and get yourself up decently, and then I’ll speak to you.”
I was under the impression she had spoken to me—pretty strongly too. This, then, was the end of my elaborately prepared toilet!
A horrid suspicion began to come over me at last, not only that Tempest had been having a little joke at my expense, but that I had lent myself to it with an alacrity and eagerness which had almost—nay, very nearly wholly—been ridiculous.
What does the reader think?
My further conversation with good Mrs Smiley, after I had, to use her own expression, made myself decent, only tended to confirm the painful impression. I even went to the length of adding, of my own accord, my six-button lavender gloves to the pile of sacrificed finery which strewed the bottom of my trunk. And when in due time a bell rang, and Mrs Smiley said, “There now, go down to call-over, and don’t be a silly any more,” I obeyed with a meekness and diffidence of which I could hardly have believed myself capable, had I not been quite sure of the fact.