f linen. It is my notice to abdicate; he turns down the bottoms
of my trousers. I do not know how I get down from the throne.

ON MAKING CALLS

I know a boy who dislikes to make calls. Making a call, he says, is
'just sitting on a chair.'

I have had the same feeling, although I had never defined it so nicely.
One 'just sits on a chair'--precariously, yet with an odd sense of
unhappy security, of having grown to and become part of that chair, as
if one dreaded to fall off, yet strongly suspected that any real effort
to get up and go away would bring the chair up and away with him. He is,
so to speak, like a barnacle on a rock in an ocean of conversation. He
may exhibit unbarnacle-like activity, cross and uncross his legs, fold
and unfold his arms, twiddle his useful fingers, incline his tired head
this way and that to relieve the strain on his neck, assume (like an
actor) expressions of interest, amusement, surprise, pleasure, or what
not. He may even speak or laugh. But he remains sitting on his chair. He
is more and more certain that he cannot get up.

He is unlike the bottoms of his own trousers. Calmly, quietly, and by
imperceptible degrees _they_ get up. Higher and higher they ascend
kneeward; they have an ambition to achieve the waist. Every little while
he must unostentatiously, and with an easy, careless, indifferent,
well-bred, and even _blase_ gesture, manage to pull them down.

I am referring, you understand, to the mature, married gentleman.
Between boyhood and maturity there is a period (without which there
would be fewer marriages, and perhaps none at all) when a call is a
personal adventure, and it often happens that the recipient of the
call, rather than the caller himself, fears that somehow or other he and
his chair have grown together. But my boy friend, as I think you will
agree when you consider his situation, does not, strictly speaking,
call: he is taken to call. And just so is it with the average mature,
married gentleman; the chief difference--and even this does not
invariably hold good--is that he dresses himself. He has become part and
parcel (particularly parcel) of a wise and necessary division of life in
which the social end is taken over by a feminine partner. She is the
expert. She knows when and where to call, what to say, and when to go
home. Married, a gentleman has no further responsibilities in this
business--except to come cheerfully and sit on his chair without
wriggli