City and town life -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
As the spring filled out and became summer we noticed that Mehronay was
singing fewer gospel hymns and rather more sentimental songs than usual.
And then the horrible report came to the office that Mehronay had been
seen by one of the printers walking by night after bed-time under the
State Street elms with a woman. Also his items began to indicate a
closer knowledge of what was going on in society than Mehronay naturally
could have. In the fall we learned through the girls in the Bee Hive
that he had bought a white shirt and a pair of celluloid cuffs. This
rumour set the office afire with curiosity, but no one dared to tease
Mehronay. For no one knew who she was.
Not until late in the fall, when Madame Janauschek came to the opera
house to play "Macbeth," did Mehronay uncover his intrigue. Then for
the first time in his three years' employment on the paper he asked for
two show tickets! The entire office lined up at the opera house--most of
us paying our own way, not to see the Macbeths, but to see Mehronay's
Romeo and Juliet. The office devil, who was late mailing the papers that
night, says that about seven o'clock Mehronay came in singing "Jean,
Jean, my Bonnie Jean," and that he went to his trunk, took out his
celluloid cuffs, a new sky-blue and shell-pink necktie that none of us
had seen before, a clean paper collar--and the boy, who probably was
mistaken, swears Mehronay also took his white shirt--in a bundle which
he proudly tucked under his arm and toddled out of the office whistling
a wedding march. An hour later, dressed in this regalia and a new black
suit, buttoned primly and exactly in a fashion unknown to Mehronay, he
appeared at the opera house with Miss Columbia Merley, spinster, teacher
of Greek and Hellenic philosophy at the College. The office force asked
in a gasp of wonder: "Who dressed him?" Miss Merley--late in her
forties, steel-eyed, thin-chested, flint-faced and with hair knotted so
tightly back from her high stony brow that she had to take out two
hairpins to wink--Miss Merley might have done it--but she had no kith or
kin who could have done it for her, and certainly the hand that smoothed
the coat buttoned the vest, and the hand that buttoned the vest put on
the collar and tie, and as for the shirt----
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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