That was before Biddy Malone told me about why it was that the perfessor and his wife didn't get along well, and as I was saying I didn't blame her none, Miss Estelle having finally beat her out about her own children, too; and she feeling she didn't scarcely own 'em no more, and they hardly daring to kiss their own mamma with Miss Estelle in the room because of germs, so Biddy says. Biddy, she says the perfessor is all right, he's just a fool and don't mean no harm by his scientific gags, but Miss Estelle she's a she-devil and takes that way to make herself the boss of that house. If she wasn't there Mrs. Booth would have been boss and never let the perfessor know it and things wouldn't a-been so bad. Which shows that so long as every house got to have a boss it ain't so much difference if it's a him or her so long as it ain't a relation. The perfessor always eats his dinner in one of them coats with the open-face vest to it, and one night I thinks I will, too. When you is in Rome you does like the Dagos does, I thinks. So I sends for James along before dinner time and I says: “Where is my dinky clothes to eat dinner in?” I says. James he says I'm to continue to eat dinner by myself. Which is all right, I tells him, but I'll do it in style or I'll quit the job. So he goes and asks Miss Estelle, and she comes in with that lemon grin on, but looking, too, like I done something to please her. “Is it true,” she says, “that already the effects of a refined environment has overcome defections in early training and a misfortune in ancestral hereditary?” she says. Or they was words to that effect. “It is true,” I says. And the perfessor's being too small she made James give me his'n. But when I seen all that shirt front it made me feel kind of uncomfortable, too. So I takes them off again and puts on my old striped sweater and puts on the vest and coat over that, and the effect of them red stripes running crossways is something gorgeous with one of them open-face vests over it.