Gumbril looked down at himself. He resented Mr. Bojanus’s negleejay, he was pained and wounded by the aspersion. Negleejay? And he had fancied that he really looked rather elegant and distinguished (but, after all, he always looked that, even in rags)—no, that he looked positively neat, like Mr. Porteous, positively soldierly in his black jacket and his musical comedy trousers and his patent leather shoes. And the black felt hat—didn’t that just add the foreign, the Southern touch which saved the whole composition from banality? He regarded himself, trying to see his clothes—garments, Mr. Bojanus had called them; garments, good Lord!—through the tailor’s expert eyes. There were sagging folds about the overloaded pockets, there was a stain on his waistcoat, the knees of his trousers were baggy and puckered like the bare knees of Hélène Fourmont in Rubens’s fur-coat portrait at Vienna. Yes, it was all horribly negleejay. He felt depressed; but looking at Mr. Bojanus’s studied and professional correctness, he was a little comforted. That frock-coat, for example. It was like something in a very modern picture—such a smooth, unwrinkled cylinder about the chest, such a sense of pure and abstract conic-ness in the sleekly rounded skirts! Nothing could have been less negleejay. He was reassured. “I want you,” he said at last, clearing his throat importantly, “to make me a pair of trousers to a novel specification of my own. It’s a new idea.” And he gave a brief description of Gumbril’s Patent Small Clothes. Mr. Bojanus listened with attention. “I can make them for you,” he said, when the description was finished. “I can make them for you—if you _really_ wish, Mr. Gumbril,” he added. “Thank you,” said Gumbril. “And do you intend, may I ask, Mr. Gumbril, to _wear_ these ... these garments?” Guiltily, Gumbril denied himself. “Only to demonstrate the idea, Mr. Bojanus. I am exploiting the invention commercially, you see.” “Commercially? I see, Mr. Gumbril.” “Perhaps you would like a share,” suggested Gumbril. Mr. Bojanus shook his head. “It wouldn’t do for my cleeantail, I fear, Mr. Gumbril. You could ’ardly expect the Best People to wear such things.” “Couldn’t you?” Mr. Bojanus went on shaking his head. “I know them,” he said, “I know the Best People. Well.” And he added with an irrelevance that was, perhaps, only apparent, “Between ourselves, Mr. Gumbril, I am a great admirer of Lenin....” “So am I,” said Gumbril, “theoretically. But then I have so little to lose to Lenin. I can afford to admire him. But you, Mr. Bojanus, you, the prosperous bourgeois—oh, purely in the economic sense of the word, Mr. Bojanus....” Mr. Bojanus accepted the explanation with one of his old-world bows. “... you would be among the first to suffer if an English Lenin were to start his activities here.”