resent refuge, meant to hold this fort against
all comers, until Bob Slack came home. He would barricade himself in if
need be. He would pile furniture against the doors. If they took him at
all it would be by direct assault and overpowering numbers.

And while he withstood siege and awaited attack he would rid himself of
these unlucky caparisons that had been his mortification and his
undoing. When they broke in on him--if they did break in on him--he
would be found wearing some of Bob Slack's clothes. Better far to be
mistaken for a burglar than to be dragged forth lamentably yet
fancifully attired as Himself at the Age of Three. The one thing might
be explained--and in time would be; but the other? He felt that he was
near the breaking point; that he could no more endure.

XII

He stopped where he was, in the middle of the room, with his eyes and
his hands seeking for the seams of the closing of his main garment. Then
he remembered what in his stress he had forgotten--the opening or
perhaps one should say the closing was at the back. He twisted his arms
rearward, his fingers groping along his spine.

Now any normal woman has the abnormal ability to do and then to undo a
garment hitching behind. Nature, which so fashioned her elbows that she
cannot throw a stone at a hen in the way in which a stone properly
should be thrown at a hen, made suitable atonement for this articular
oversight by endowing her joints with the facile knack of turning on
exactly the right angle, with never danger of sprain or dislocation, for
the subjugation of a back-latching frock. Moreover, years of practice
have given her adeptness in accomplishing this achievement, so that to
her it has become an everyday feat. But man has neither the experience
to qualify him nor yet the bodily adaptability.

By reaching awkwardly up and over his shoulder Mr. Leary managed to tug
the topmost button of his array of buttons out of its attendant
buttonholes, but below and beyond that point he could not progress. He
twisted and contorted his body; he stretched his arms in their sockets
until twin pangs of agony met and crossed between his shoulder blades,
and with his two exploring hands he pulled and fumbled and pawed and
wrenched and wrested, to make further headway at his task. But the
sewing-on had been done with stout thread; the buttonholes were taut and
snug and well made. Those slippery flat surfaces amply resisted him.
They eluded him; defied h