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The Berliners are plain and ill dressed, both men and women, and even the little children are plain. Every one is ill dressed, but no one is ragged, and among the undersized homely folk of the lower classes there is no such poverty-stricken shabbiness as shocks and insults the sight in New York.
He can let his hotel run down to the last degree of shabbiness and yet have it full of people all the time. For instance, there is the Hotel de Ville, in Milan. It swarms with mice and fleas, and if the rest of the world were destroyed it could furnish dirt enough to start another one with.
Why, the house is an advertisement of shabbiness; the vicar's coat is green with age, and the poor little kiddies look as if they had come out of the ark! Mrs Thornton has pluck enough for a dozen, or she would never keep things going as she does; but she looks an old woman before her time." "Then it is your deliberate conclusion that I ought to increase the Vicar's stipend?"
Clay had read about the magnificence of Canfield's in the old days, and he was surprised that one so fastidious as Bromfield should patronize a place so dingy and so rough as this. At the end of one room was a marble mantelpiece above which there was a defaced, gilt-frame mirror. The chandeliers, the chairs, the wall-paper, all suggested the same note of one-time opulence worn to shabbiness.
As he stood in his shabbiness under the high, carved door, the only permanent denizen of the building, he seemed an embodiment of the old shrunken Venetian life, still haunting a city it was no longer strong enough to use. "Will you show this signor the way out?" said Kitty, in tourists' Italian. "Are you soon shutting up?"
As for his coat, though remarkable for its cleanliness, it was always half worn-out, but without spots or creases. The preservation of that garment was something marvellous to those who noticed the chevalier's high-bred indifference to its shabbiness.
Yet he let another pay; there's the shabbiness. "Oh, shabby Wheeler, shabby! Alas! I must vote for him. Rory sings. "True game to the last; no Wheeler for me; Talbot, oh, Talbot's the dog for me." Burs. Wheeler, if you are not chosen Captain, you must see and pay me for the dress. Wheel. I am as poor as a rat. Rory.
As she re-entered her old familiar parlor, she almost gave a gulp of mortification over its plainness and shabbiness; for the first time in years she had given herself a chance to know it for what it was. "There, now," Jane declared loudly, "you've both seen what money and brains can do. Well, haven't we got money? Haven't we got brains?
"He must behave well before people, or men will say he is a 'cad' to visit his disappointment on his poor little simple-hearted wife," she thought. "He knows that. Then it is an enormous relief that Katherine still clings to the boys, poor dears! She really is a trump; so I have only myself to think of; and Duke shall find that his shabbiness and ill-temper do him no good.
After she had taken the baby for her morning airing on the Heath, she left the two younger children with the maid, and went into town to lunch. She chose again the Royal Red, but not the table behind the pillar from which she had peered, glad of its shelter for her shabbiness, a year ago.
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