“What will people think of me,” she asked, “if you insist on going about with two buttons off your vest, and looking as if you haven’t had anything pressed since the flood? Whenever I do get one of your suits to look respectable, you wear it out to the farm and forget to put your overalls on, and then you climb trees, I suppose, or something else as destructive; and after that you rush off downtown where everybody sees you looking like the Old Scratch—that’s what your father said, and it troubles him, too, dear. You were so particular all through college, always just the very pink of fashion, and now, all of a sudden, you’ve changed the way some young men do when they’ve married and get careworn over having two or three babies at home. Won’t you try to reform, dear?”
He laughed and petted her, and went on as before, unreformed. Clerks, glancing out of the great plate-glass windows of a trust company, would giggle as they saw him hurrying by on his way from one office to another, rehearsing to himself as he went and disfiguring his memorandum book with hasty new mathematics. “There it goes again!” they would say, perhaps. “Big Chief Ten-Years-From-Now, rushin’ the season in year-before-last’s straw hat and a Seymour coat! Look at him talkin’ to his old notebook, though! Guess that’s about all he’s got left he _can_ talk to without gettin’ laughed to death!”
Dan found one listener, however, who did not laugh, but listened to him without interruption, until the oration was concluded, although it was unduly protracted under the encouragement of such benevolent circumstance. This was Mr. Joseph Kohn, the father of Dan’s former partner in the ornamental bracket business. Kohn & Sons was an establishment formerly mentioned by National Avenue as a “cheap Jew dry-goods store”; and prosperous housewives usually laughed apologetically about anything they happened to have bought there. But, as the years went by, the façade of Kohn & Sons widened; small shops on each side were annexed, and the “cheap dry-goods store” was spoken of as a “cheap department store,” until in time it became customary to omit the word “cheap.” Old Joe Kohn was one of the directors of the First National Bank; he enjoyed the friendship of the president of that institution, and was mentioned in a tone of respect by even the acrid Shelby.