Oh, I don't say they're any better," she again made haste to say in arrest of her husband's resentment."I don't believe they are; and I don't see why they should be.
And there ain't anybody has got a better right to hold up their head than you have, Silas.You've got plenty of money, and you've made every cent of it.""I guess I shouldn't amounted to much without you, Persis,"interposed Lapham, moved to this justice by her praise.
"Oh, don't talk about ME!" protested the wife.
"Now that you've made it all right about Rogers, there ain't a thing in this world against you.But still, for all that, I can see--and I can feel it when Ican't see it--that we're different from those people.
They're well-meaning enough, and they'd excuse it, I presume, but we're too old to learn to be like them.""The children ain't," said Lapham shrewdly.
"No, the children ain't," admitted his wife, "and that's the only thing that reconciles me to it.""You see how pleased Irene looked when I read it?""Yes, she was pleased."
"And I guess Penelope'll think better of it before the time comes.""Oh yes, we do it for them.But whether we're doing the best thing for 'em, goodness knows.I'm not saying anything against HIM.Irene'll be a lucky girl to get him, if she wants him.But there! I'd ten times rather she was going to marry such a fellow as you were, Si, that had to make every inch of his own way, and she had to help him.
It's in her!"
Lapham laughed aloud for pleasure in his wife's fondness;but neither of them wished that he should respond directly to it."I guess, if it wa'n't for me, he wouldn't have a much easier time.But don't you fret! It's all coming out right.
That dinner ain't a thing for you to be uneasy about.
It'll pass off perfectly easy and natural."Lapham did not keep his courageous mind quite to the end of the week that followed.It was his theory not to let Corey see that he was set up about the invitation, and when the young man said politely that his mother was glad they were able to come, Lapham was very short with him.He said yes, he believed that Mrs.Lapham and the girls were going.
Afterward he was afraid Corey might not understand that he was coming too; but he did not know how to approach the subject again, and Corey did not, so he let it pass.
It worried him to see all the preparation that his wife and Irene were ******, and he tried to laugh at them for it;and it worried him to find that Penelope was ****** no preparation at all for herself, but only helping the others.
He asked her what should she do if she changed her mind at the last moment and concluded to go, and she said she guessed she should not change her mind, but if she did, she would go to White's with him and get him to choose her an imported dress, he seemed to like them so much.
He was too proud to mention the subject again to her.
Finally, all that dress-****** in the house began to scare him with vague apprehensions in regard to his own dress.
As soon as he had determined to go, an ideal of the figure in which he should go presented itself to his mind.
He should not wear any dress-coat, because, for one thing, he considered that a man looked like a fool in a dress-coat, and, for another thing, he had none--had none on principle.
He would go in a frock-coat and black pantaloons, and perhaps a white waistcoat, but a black cravat anyway.
But as soon as he developed this ideal to his family, which he did in pompous disdain of their anxieties about their own dress, they said he should not go so.
Irene reminded him that he was the only person without a dress-coat at a corps reunion dinner which he had taken her to some years before, and she remembered feeling awfully about it at the time.Mrs.Lapham, who would perhaps have agreed of herself, shook her head with misgiving.
"I don't see but what you'll have to get you one, Si,"she said."I don't believe they ever go without 'em to a private house."He held out openly, but on his way home the next day, in a sudden panic, he cast anchor before his tailor's door and got measured for a dress-coat.After that he began to he afflicted about his waist-coat, concerning which he had hitherto been airily indifferent.
He tried to get opinion out of his family, but they were not so clear about it as they were about the frock.
It ended in their buying a book of etiquette, which settled the question adversely to a white waistcoat.
The author, however, after being very explicit in telling them not to eat with their knives, and above all not to pick their teeth with their forks,--a thing which he said no lady or gentleman ever did,--was still far from decided as to the kind of cravat Colonel Lapham ought to wear: shaken on other points, Lapham had begun to waver also concerning the black cravat.As to the question of gloves for the Colonel, which suddenly flashed upon him one evening, it appeared never to have entered the thoughts of the etiquette man, as Lapham called him.
Other authors on the same subject were equally silent, and Irene could only remember having heard, in some vague sort of way, that gentlemen did not wear gloves so much any more.
Drops of perspiration gathered on Lapham's forehead in the anxiety of the debate; he groaned, and he swore a little in the compromise profanity which he used.
"I declare," said Penelope, where she sat purblindly sewing on a bit of dress for Irene, "the Colonel's clothes are as much trouble as anybody's.Why don't you go to Jordan & Marsh's and order one of the imported dresses for yourself, father?" That gave them all the relief of a laugh over it, the Colonel joining in piteously.
