On the day following I set the date of my departure and at the end of my announcement mother sat in silence, her face clouded with pain, her eyes looking away into space. She had nothing to say in opposition, not a word--she only said, "If you're going I guess the quicker you start the better." CHAPTER SEVEN London and Evening Dress Confession must now be made on a personal matter of capital importance. Up to my thirty-ninth year I had never worn a swallow-tail evening coat, and the question of conforming to a growing sartorial custom was becoming, each day, of more acute concern to my friends as well as to myself. My first realization of the differences which the lack of evening dress can make in a man's career, came upon me clearly during the social stir of the Columbian Exposition, for throughout my ten years' stay in Boston I had accepted (with serene unconsciousness of the incongruity of my action) the paradoxical theory that a "Prince Albert frock coat" was the proper holiday or ceremonial garment of an American democrat. The claw-hammer suit was to me, as to my fellow artist, "the livery of privilege" worn only by monopolistic brigands and the poor parasites who fawned upon and served them, whereas the double-breasted black coat, royal, as its name denoted, was associated in my mind with judges, professors, senators and doctors of divinity. It was, moreover, a dignified and logical garment. It clothed with equal charity a man's stomach and his stern. Generous of its skirts, which went far to conceal wrinkled trousers, it could be worn with a light tie at a formal dinner or with a dark tie at a studio tea, and was equally appropriate at a funeral or a wedding. For all these several reasons it remained the uniform of professional men throughout the Middle Border. From my earliest childhood it had been my ideal of manly elegance. Even in New York I had kept pretty close to the social level where it was still accepted. The World's Fair in '93, however, had not only brought to Chicago many of the discriminating social customs of the East, but also many distinguished guests from the old world to whom dress was a formal, almost sacred routine. To meet these noble aliens, we, the artists and writers of the city, were occasionally invited; and the question "Shall we conform" became ever more pressing in its demand for final settlement. One by one my fellows had deserted from the ranks and were reported as rubbing shoulders with plutocrats in their great dining-rooms or escorting ladies into gilded reception parlors, wearing garments which had no relationship to learning, or art, or law, as I had been taught to believe. Lorado Taft, Oliver Dennett Grover, and even Henry Fuller had gone over to the shining majority, leaving me almost alone in stubborn support of the cylindrical coat.