hip with Carlyle,
Thoreau, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Emerson, Professor Henry, Liberty H.
Bailey, Cyril Hopkins, Dean Davenport and the great obscurities of the
experiment stations, may be excused if his views regarding clothes are
derived in a transcendental manner from _Sartor Resartus_ and the
agricultural college tests as to the relation between Shelter and
Feeding.

"Why, mother," said he, "I think it would be pretty hard to explain to the
Woodruffs that you stayed away because of clothes. They have seen you in
the clothes you wear pretty often for the last thirty years!"

* * * * *

Was a woman ever quite without a costume?

Mrs. Irwin gazed at vacancy for a while, and went to the old bureau. From
the bottom drawer she took an old, old black alpaca dress--a dress which
Jim had never seen. She spread it out on her bed in the alcove off the
combined kitchen, parlor and dining-room in which they lived, and smoothed
out the wrinkles. It was almost whole, save for the places where her body,
once so much fuller than now, had drawn the threads apart--under the arms,
and at some of the seams--and she handled it as one deals with something
very precious.

"I never thought I'd wear it again," said she, "but once. I've been saving
it for my last dress. But I guess it won't hurt to wear it once for the
benefit of the living."

Jim kissed his mother--a rare thing, save as the caress was called for by
the established custom between them.

"Don't think of that, mother," said he, "for years and years yet!"

CHAPTER X

HOW JIM WAS LINED UP

There is no doubt that Jennie Woodruff was justified in thinking that they
were a queer couple. They weren't like the Woodruffs, at all. They were of
a different pattern. To be sure, Jim's clothes were not especially
noteworthy, being just shiny, and frayed at cuff and instep, and short of
sleeve and leg, and ill-fitting and cheap. They betrayed poverty, and the
inability of a New York sweatshop to anticipate the prodigality of Nature
in the matter of length of leg and arm, and wealth of bones and joints
which she had lavished upon Jim Irwin. But the Woodruff table had often
enjoyed Jim's presence, and the standards prevailing there as to clothes
were only those of plain people who eat with their hired men, buy their
clothes at a county seat town, and live simply and sensibly on the fat of
the land. Jim's queerness lay not so much in