t 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 making, and he tried to laugh at them for
it; and it worried him to find that Penelope was making 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-making 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 be 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