In this respect New York is its only serious rival.
MY TROUSSEAU.
Having been a bachelor from my earliest youth I suppose I ought to be accustomed to the condition; but the fact remains that I miss something—something which only a wedding supplies.
Curiously enough this want is not a wife. I have been without one so long that I should not know what to do with her if I had one. I should probably overlook her, and she would become atrophied or die of neglect or thirst. Neither do I crave a home of my own; nor golden-haired children to climb up my knee. I can do without these accessories.
But what I do hunger for and what I will have is a trousseau. Why the acquisition of a trousseau should be a purely feminine prerogative I have never been able to understand. A bride without a trousseau is generally regarded as an incomplete thing—a poached-egg without toast; a salad without dressing. But the bridegroom without a trousseau is a recognised institution. True, he has new clothes, both seen and unseen, but this is not a trousseau; it is merely a "replenishment of his wardrobe." His least disreputable old things are "made to do"; and nobody thinks slightingly of him if he attends his wedding in a re-cuffed shirt or in boots that have been resoled. A girl, however, would as soon think of entering Paradise with a second-hand halo as she would contemplate being married in anything that was not aggressively new.
Thus it is that before my wish can be consummated I have two honoured conventions to defy: that only a girl may possess a trousseau, and that a marriage is a necessary condition to the acquiring of it. Fortunately I am strong-minded. A long course of Mrs. Humphry Ward's homilies has given me no little facility in achieving this attribute, and I am determined that I will change neither my sex nor my status.
Now, I have prepared a list, just as—I suppose—every girl does. In the first place I am going to indulge in the hitherto undreamt-of luxury of a surfeit of dress-shirts. No one who has not experienced life on two dress-shirts—one in wear, the other in the wash—can quite understand what this will mean to me. Men like Sir Joseph Beecham, Mr. Mallaby-Deeley, Mr. Solly Joel, Lord Howard de Walden, and others, who, I daresay, have four or even five, cannot know what it is to feel that their evening's refreshment and entertainment depend on their finding the French chalk or the india-rubber.
Therefore I am making no stint in this matter. I am having fifteen dress-shirts, so that there may be one for wear each day in the week, seven in the laundry, and one over for emergencies—like Parsifal, that begins in the middle of the afternoon. I mean to be similarly lavish in the matter of collars and handkerchiefs. The number of the former which I am buying amounts almost to an epidemic; while the extent of my commission in the latter is the result of lessons learnt in the hard school of experience. I say unhesitatingly that the man who tries to get through life on a mere dozen handkerchiefs is simply begging for disaster, as, however methodical in their use he may be, a carelessly-caught cold may any day upset his reckoning and leave him at a loose end; sometimes scarcely that. Hence I am doing this part of my trousseau in princely fashion. I am having half a gross of them.