We rushed right in and made a clerk drag it out of the window. He did it a little doubtfully, it seemed—evidently unaware how many moneyed men dress very plainly, not to say shabbily. But our enthusiasm finally impressed him. He held it up for us, and we slipped with a sigh of tremulous delight into its soothing embrace. Lordy, how that coat fitted! How gently it caressed us, and how gracefully it hung upon the angles of our frame! There is something positively sinful in such comfort as that.
Of course, it wouldn't do to let the clerk see how delighted we were with it—he might raise the price again. So we controlled our voice as best we could, and asked him if the skins were all right. We even tried to look disparaging.
"All right?" he almost shouted. "Why, if it wasn't for the stringency and all that, this coat would be selling at three times—but you can see for yourself. Just look at those skins—everyone of them taken in the middle of winter!" And in his indignation at our attitude, he grabbed a couple of minks and crumpled them up as if he were going to tear them out of the coat and throw them away.
That's a peculiar thing about fine furs. The finer they are, the more the connoisseur seems to abuse them. Poor skins have to be handled with great care, we presume, but when your real expert gets hold of a good piece of fur, he shakes it and beats it and tries to pull the hair out of it.
It was also very nice to know that the minks had been taken in the winter when they had all their fur on. In the summer, when the minks are wearing nothing but their swimming-trunks, so to speak—but the thing doesn't bear thinking of.
It was just the coat we had always wanted—the clerk said we looked great in it—but after a hasty recollection of our bank-balance as it appeared when we last put a dint in it, we told him we would call again. And we kept calling. We called about a dozen times. We simply couldn't keep away from that fur-coat. And every time we went we brought a friend or two with us to look it over and give us advice. We put the coat on and walked around the store in it to show how it hung, and then we took it off and adjourned to the nearest cigar-stand or blind-pig to discuss the matter. The coat cost us about twenty dollars in a couple of weeks.
Our friends all admired the coat, but curiously enough, they all advised against us buying it—perhaps from a conscientious objection to seeing so much money tied up in mere fur. They always warned us that if we once wore it, we'd have to go on wearing it all the time for fear of catching cold. They said that's the worst of fur-coats—one doesn't dare leave them off. But naturally, if we got that coat, we intended to go on wearing it till about the middle of June. When it got too hot to wear it open, we'd carry it on our arm with the lining turned out.
Lately the clerk had been getting quite sniffy. The last time we were in, he intimated that the coat was beginning to look rather used from being worn around the store so much. We finally had to discontinue these visits, but we hated to tear ourself away from that glorious garment. The first thing we knew some butcher might buy it.
But perhaps some rich relative of ours, turning up rather unexpectedly—we don't insist on any close consanguinity so long as he is rich—may see this pathetic screed and feel that here is a chance to help genius in distress. What's the use of erecting monuments to us after we are dead? How much better and kinder it would be to buy that coat and send it down to the office while we are still comparatively alive. In fact, this is our idea in writing this article.
