t that
evening."

"Rats! The rest of 'em won't want to dress."

"Of course they will. You remember when you didn't dress for the
Littlefields' supper-party, and all the rest did, and how embarrassed
you were."

"Embarrassed, hell! I wasn't embarrassed. Everybody knows I can put
on as expensive a Tux. as anybody else, and I should worry if I don't
happen to have it on sometimes. All a darn nuisance, anyway. All right
for a woman, that stays around the house all the time, but when a
fellow's worked like the dickens all day, he doesn't want to go and
hustle his head off getting into the soup-and-fish for a lot of folks
that he's seen in just reg'lar ordinary clothes that same day."

"You know you enjoy being seen in one. The other evening you admitted
you were glad I'd insisted on your dressing. You said you felt a lot
better for it. And oh, Georgie, I do wish you wouldn't say 'Tux.' It's
'dinner-jacket.'"

"Rats, what's the odds?"

"Well, it's what all the nice folks say. Suppose Lucile McKelvey heard
you calling it a 'Tux.'"

"Well, that's all right now! Lucile McKelvey can't pull anything on
me! Her folks are common as mud, even if her husband and her dad are
millionaires! I suppose you're trying to rub in your exalted social
position! Well, let me tell you that your revered paternal ancestor,
Henry T., doesn't even call it a 'Tux.'! He calls it a 'bobtail jacket
for a ringtail monkey,' and you couldn't get him into one unless you
chloroformed him!"

"Now don't be horrid, George."

"Well, I don't want to be horrid, but Lord! you're getting as fussy as
Verona. Ever since she got out of college she's been too rambunctious
to live with--doesn't know what she wants--well, I know what she
wants!--all she wants is to marry a millionaire, and live in Europe,
and hold some preacher's hand, and simultaneously at the same time stay
right here in Zenith and be some blooming kind of a socialist agitator
or boss charity-worker or some damn thing! Lord, and Ted is just as bad!
He wants to go to college, and he doesn't want to go to college.
Only one of the three that knows her own mind is Tinka. Simply can't
understand how I ever came to have a pair of shillyshallying children
like Rone and Ted. I may not be any Rockefeller or James J. Shakespeare,
but I certainly do know my own mind, and I do keep right on plugging
along in the office and--Do you know the latest? Far as I can figure
out, Ted's new bee is he'd like to be