en to order of silk and cotton. My shoes cost
me fourteen dollars a pair; my silk socks, six dollars; my ordinary
shirts, five dollars; and my dress shirts, fifteen dollars each. On
brisk evenings I wear to dinner and the opera a mink-lined overcoat, for
which my wife recently paid seven hundred and fifty dollars. The storage
and insurance on this coat come to twenty-five dollars annually and the
repairs to about forty-five. I am rather fond of overcoats and own half
a dozen of them, all made in Inverness.

I wear silk pajamas--pearl-gray, pink, buff and blue, with frogs, cuffs
and monograms--which by the set cost me forty dollars. I also have a
pair of pearl evening studs to wear with my dress suit, for which my
wife paid five hundred and fifty dollars, and my cuff buttons cost me a
hundred and seventy-five. Thus, if I am not an exquisite--which I
distinctly am not--I am exceedingly well dressed, and I am glad to be
so. If I did not have a fur coat to wear to the opera I should feel
embarrassed, out of place and shabby. All the men who sit in the boxes
at the Metropolitan Opera House have fur overcoats.

As a boy I had very few clothes indeed, and those I had were made to
last a long time. But now without fine raiment I am sure I should be
miserable. I cannot imagine myself shabby. Yet I can imagine any one of
my friends being shabby without feeling any uneasiness about it--that is
to say, I am the first to profess a democracy of spirit in which clothes
cut no figure at all. I assert that it is the man, and not his clothes,
that I value; but in my own case my silk-and-cotton undershirt is a
necessity, and if deprived of it I should, I know, lose some attribute
of self.

At any rate, my bluff, easy, confident manner among my fellow men, which
has played so important a part in my success, would be impossible. I
could never patronize anybody if my necktie were frayed or my sleeves
too short. I know that my clothes are as much a part of my entity as my
hair, eyes and voice--more than any of the rest of me.

Based on the figures given above I am worth--the material part of me--as
I step out of my front door to go forth to dinner, something over
fifteen hundred dollars. If I were killed in a railroad accident all
these things would be packed carefully in a box, inventoried, and given
a much greater degree of attention than my mere body. I saw Napoleon's
boots and waistcoat the other day in Paris and I felt that he himself