getting out of their carriages, intent on their shopping, bowing to
the men as they ran into the shops, making amends for the sombre
black of the men's coats by a delirium of feathers, skirts, and pink
ankles. And nodding to their friends, bowing to the ladies in the
carriages, Harding and Owen edged their way through the crowd.

"The street at this hour is like a ballroom, isn't it?" Owen said. "I
want to get some cigars." And they turned into a celebrated store,
where half a dozen assistants were busily engaged in tying up
parcels of five hundred or a thousand cigars, or displaying
neatly-made paper boxes containing a hundred cigarettes.

"When will men give up smoking pipes, I should like to know?"

"I thought you were a pipe smoker?"

"So I was, but I can t bear the smell any longer."

"Yet you smoke cigars?"

"Cigars are different."

"How was it the change came?"

"I don't know." Owen ordered a thousand cigars to be sent to Berkeley
Square.

It was late for tea, and still too early for dinner.

"I am sorry to ask you to dine at such an early hour, but I daresay
we shan't have dinner till half-past seven."

But Harding remembered his tailor: some trousers. And he led Owen
towards Hanover Square, wondering if Owen would approve of his
choice?

"It was like you to choose that grey."

Now what was there to find fault with in the grey he had chosen? They
turned over the tailor's pattern sheet. Daring, in the art of
dressing, is the prescriptive right of the professional just as it
is in writing. Owen was a professional dresser, whereas he, Harding,
was but an amateur; and that was why he had chosen a timid,
insignificant grey. At once Owen discovered a much more effective
cloth; and he chose a coat for Harding, who wanted one--the same
rough material which Harding had often admired on Owen's shoulders.
But would such a dashing coat suit him as well as it did its
originator, and dare he wear the fancy waistcoats Owen was pressing
upon him?

"They suit you, Asher, but you still go in at the waist, and brown
trousers look well on legs as straight as billiard cues."

"Is there nothing we can do for you, Sir Owen?"

Owen spoke about sending back a coat which he was not altogether
satisfied with.

"Every suit of clothes I have, Harding, costs me fifty pounds."

Harding raised his thick eyebrows, and Owen explained that only one
suit in six was worth wearing.

"There is more truth in what you say tha