Humorous stories; London (England) -- Fiction; Wealth -- Fiction
The establishment into which Mr. Prohack disappeared was that of his
son's tailors. He slipped into it with awe, not wholly because the
tailors were his son's tailors, but in part because they were tailors to
various august or once-august personages throughout Europe. Till that
day Mr. Prohack had bought his clothes from an insignificant though
traditional tailor in Maddox Street, to whom he had been taken as a boy
by his own father. And he had ordered his clothes hastily, negligently,
anyhow, in intervals snatched from meal-hours or on the way from one
more important appointment to another more important appointment. Indeed
he had thought no more of ordering a suit than of ordering a whiskey and
soda. Nay, he had on one occasion fallen incredibly low, and his memory
held the horrid secret for ever,--on one occasion he had actually bought
a ready-made suit. It had fitted him, for he was slimmish and of a good
stock size, but he had told nobody, not even his wife, of this shocking
defection from the code of true British gentlemanliness,--and he had
never repeated the crime; the secret would die with him. And now he was
devoting the top of the morning to the commandment of a suit. The affair
was his chief business, and he had come to it in a great car whose six
cylinders were working harmoniously for nothing else, and with the aid
of an intelligent and experienced and expert human being whose sole
object in life that morning was to preside over Mr. Prohack's locomotion
to and from the tailors'!
Mr. Prohack perceived that he was only beginning to comprehend the
wonder of existence. The adepts at the tailors', however, seemed to see
nothing wonderful in the matter. They showed no surprise that he had
written to make an appointment with a particular adept named
Melchizidek, who had been casually mentioned weeks earlier by Charles as
the one man in London who really comprehended waistcoats. They took it
as a matter of course that Mr. Prohack had naught else to do with the
top of the morning but order clothes, and that while he did so he should
keep a mature man and a vast and elaborate machine waiting for him in
the street outside. And Mr. Melchizidek's manner alone convinced Mr.
Prohack that what he had told his family, and that what he had told Miss
Winstock in the car, was strictly true and not the invention of his
fancy--namely that the appointment was genuinely of high importance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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