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Updated: June 5, 2025
For the first time since he had deserted college he had been able to write to his father, to answer the grim carpenter's unspoken criticisms of the son who had given up his chance for an "education." And proudly he had sent to his father a little check. He had a beautiful new fifteen-dollar suit of blue serge at home.
"And how I wish I had gone home with mother!" Wishing, however, was of no avail, and when that night at half- past ten, the hotel omnibus as usual went to the depot, it carried a very cross young lady, who, little heeding what she did, and caring less, sat down beneath a crevice in the roof, through which the rain crept in, lodging upon the satin bows and drooping plumes of her fifteen-dollar hat, which, in her disappointment, she had forgotten to exchange for the older one, safely stowed away in the bandbox she held upon her lap.
Nancy's pallor increased. She closed her eyes. "Don't do that," Billy said sharply. "No woman can faint on me just because she's had money left her. You make me feel like the ghost of Hamlet's father." Nancy clutched at his sleeve. "Don't, Billy!" she besought. "I'm past joking now. Fifty thousand a year! Why, Uncle Elijah bought fifteen-dollar suits and fifteen-cent lunches.
"I hope I'll be forgiven for never paying heed to fruit tramps fruit workers before," she said soberly. "From now on I aim to. Though I shan't find none like you-all, with a Seth Thomas clock and suchlike." After the truck ride from Jersey even a fifteen-dollar automobile was luxury, with its roomy seats and two folding seats that let down between.
I started out with a determination to sell a bill of goods; and although every merchant laughed me in my face when I showed up my stock, I kept "hus'ling," and finally struck one man who bought twenty dollars' worth. This enabled me to take a fifteen-dollar package from the express office which I had ordered C.O.D. from the wholesaler, after buying my first stock on credit.
"Sell a fifteen-dollar suit for fifteen cents?" I smiled "That's a great place, that is. There are two big business streets in New York Wall Street and Division." He broke into a laugh at his own joke and I charitably joined in.
And yet it was nothing but an ordinary suit of fifteen-dollar slop-shops. Still, I was sane enough to notice this detail, to wit: many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen in the land would have made a Comanche blush. Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the idea.
A fifteen-dollar poem would make them happy for a week; and when some of my editors were slow to pay-on the literary frontiers there is a great deal of this sort of procrastination Uncle Gingersnaps was always hot to put the matter into the hands of his collectors, and commence legal proceedings in default. Little by little I drifted into a curious intimacy with the Grossenstecks.
Why didn't he have sense enough to go and buy a fifteen-dollar suit of diagonals for everyday wear. Rose was the life of the party. Her tongue rattled on in the most delightful way. "It's all Rose an' Bill's doin's," Mrs. McIlvaine explained. "They told us to come over an' pick up anybody we see on the road. So we did." Howard winced a little at her familiarity of tone.
By such simple-hearted traits as being always right about unimportant matters and idealistically wrong about important matters, politely intruding into everything, being earnest about the morality of the poor and auction bridge and the chaperonage of nice girls, possessing a working knowledge of Wagner and Rodin, wearing fifteen-dollar corsets, and believing on her bended knees that the Truegates and Winslows were the noblest families in the Social Register, Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow had persuaded the whole world, including even her near-English butler, that she was a superior woman.
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