“Decidedly! No man of whatever age should be without one,” rejoined the nascent fashionist. “Some men never sit down to dinner except in evening dress. It must be very nice to live in that way. I like such graceful ceremony in everyday customs.” Arthur cast about for something neater to say than the dismayed ejaculation bitten off just in time. “It must help a fellow to feel altogether at his ease in his company accouterments”—inspiration coming in the nick of time. “Most men look, and, judging by myself, feel like newly imported restaurant waiters when decked out in their swallow-tails.” The conventional “dress coat” is a shrewd test of innate gentlehood. A thoroughbred is never more truly one than when thus appareled. The best it can do for the plebeian, who would prefer to eat his dinner in his shirt-sleeves, is to bring him up to the level of a hotel waiter. Arthur looked like an unassuming gentleman on the following evening, when he joined his wife below-stairs. If he had not an air of fashion, he had not a touch of the vulgarian. Susie’s mien was, as he assured her, that of a queen. Her head was set well above a pair of graceful shoulders, she carried herself and managed her train cleverly. Arthur had brought her a cluster of pink roses, all of which she wore in her corsage except one bud which she pinned in his buttonhole. He put a careful finger under her chin, and lifted her face to let the full light of the chandelier rain upon it. “It would have been a pity to keep you all to myself to-night,” he said. The weather was raw, with menace of rain or snow, but neither of them thought of the extravagance of a carriage. As she had done upon previous festal occasions, the wife looped up the trailing breadths of velvet, and secured them into a “walking length” of skirt with safety pins. Over her gala attire she cast a voluminous waterproof, buttoned all the way down the front. A bonnet would have deranged her _coiffure_, and she wore, instead, a black Spanish lace scarf knotted under her chin. Slippers and light gloves went in a reticule slung upon her arm. It lacked five minutes of seven when they alighted from a street-car within a block of the Hitts’ abode. Four carriages were in line before the door, and from these stepped men swathed in long, light ulsters, who assisted to alight and ascend the stone steps apparitions in furred and embroidered opera cloaks that ravished Susie’s wits, in the swift transit of the gorgeous beings from curbstone to the hospitable entrance. A dizzying sensation of unreality, such as one experiences in finding himself unexpectedly upon a great height, seized upon her. Could these people be collected to meet _her_? Humbled, yet elated, she entered the house, and obeying the directions of the footman at the foot of the stairs, mounted to the dressing room.