nt.... I shall probably wear black trousers or
trousers of some very dark blue, and a frock-coat, tightly buttoned.'
Poor old Mr. Le V.! I think he need not fear. If there be a heaven for
the soul, there must be other heavens also, where the intellect and the
body shall be consummate. In both these heavens Mr. Le V. will have his
hierarchy. Of a life like his there can be no conclusion, really. Did
not even Matthew Arnold admit that conduct of a cane is three-fourths of
life?

Certainly Mr. Le V. is a great artist, and his supremacy is in the tact
with which he suits his toilet to his temperament. But the marvellous
affinity of a dandy's mood to his daily toilet is not merely that it
finds therein its perfect echo nor that it may even be, in reflex,
thereby accentuated or made less poignant. For some years I had felt
convinced that in a perfect dandy this affinity must reach a point, when
the costume itself, planned with the finest sensibility, would change
with the emotional changes of its wearer, automatically. But I felt that
here was one of those boundaries, where the fields of art align with the
fields of science, and I hardly dared to venture further. Moreover,
the theory was not easy to verify. I knew that, except in some great
emotional crisis, the costume could not palpably change its aspect.
Here was an impasse; for the perfect dandy--the Brummell, the Mr. Le
V.--cannot afford to indulge in any great emotion outside his art; like
Balzac, he has not time. The gods were good to me, however. One morning
near the end of last July, they decreed that I should pass through Half
Moon Street and meet there a friend who should ask me to go with him to
his club and watch for the results of the racing at Goodwood. This club
includes hardly any member who is not a devotee of the Turf, so that,
when we entered it, the cloak-room displayed long rows of unburdened
pegs--save where one hat shone. None but that illustrious dandy, Lord
X., wears quite so broad a brim as this hat had. I said that Lord X.
must be in the club.

'I conceive he is too nervous to be on the course,' my friend replied.
'They say he has plunged up to the hilt on to-day's running.'

His lordship was indeed there, fingering feverishly the sinuous ribands
of the tape-machine. I sat at a little distance, watching him. Two
results straggled forth within an hour, and, at the second of these,
I saw with wonder Lord X.'s linen actually flush for a moment and t