s Mary
Virginia Eustis ... expect a man to know, if they're not going to be
ashamed of him." He thought about this awhile, then:

"I tell you what, father," he remarked, tentatively, "it must be a
mighty fine thing to know you've got the right address written on you,
good and plain, and the right number of stamps, and the sender's name
somewhere on a corner, to keep you from going astray or to the Dead
Letter Office; and not to be scrawled in lead-pencil, and misspelt,
and finger-smutched, and with a couple of postage-due stamps stuck on
you crooked, and the Lord only knows who and where from."

"Why, yes," said I, "that's true, and one does well to consider it.
But the main thing, the really important thing, is the letter
itself--what's written inside, John Flint."

"But what's written inside wouldn't be any the worse if it was written
clearer and better, and the outside was cleaner and on nice paper? And
in pen-and-ink, not lead-pencil scratches?" he insisted earnestly.

"Of course not."

"That's what I've been thinking lately, father. Somehow, I always did
like things to have some class to 'em. I remember how I used to lean
against the restaurant windows when I was a kid, and watch the folks
inside, how they dressed and acted, and the way the nicest of 'em
handled table-tools. They weren't swells, of course, and plenty of 'em
made plenty of mistakes--I've seen stunts done with a common
table-knife that had the best of the sword-swallowing gents skinned a
mile--but I wasn't a fool, and I learned some. Then when I--er--began
to make real money (parson, I made it in wads and gobs and lumps those
days!) why, I got me the real thing in glad rags from the real thing
in tailors, and I used to blow a queen that'd been a swell herself
once, to the joint where the gilt-edged bunch eat and show off their
clothes and the rest of themselves. My jane looked the part to the
life, I had the kale and the clothes and was chesty as a head-waiter,
being considerably stuck on yours truly along about then, so we put it
over. I had the chance to get hep to the last word in clothes and
manners; that's what I'd gone for, though I didn't tell that to the
skirt I was buying the eats for. And it was good business, too, for
more than once when some precinct bonehead that pipe-dreamed he was a
detective was pussy-catting some cold rat-hole, there was me
vanbibbering in the white light at the swellest joints in little old
New York! Funny, wa