We never did wear it again. The very next day we went out and bought a set of open-faced formal clothes. For months afterwards we wouldn't go out for a walk in the evening without them. We didn't feel safe. Mere clothes might be all right for millionaires and geniuses, but sumptuous raiment for ours! We couldn't afford to wear less.
Ever since our downy and callow youth the fur-lined overcoat has been for us a symbol of wealth and a certain dashing deviltry. Of course, we are perfectly well aware that a number of tame married men, holding positions worth about twenty dollars a week, own fur-lined coats. Even on the editorial staff of which we are the bright particular star there are two or three overcoats lined with something definitely recognizable as fur.
Nevertheless we have never been able to conquer our instinctive feeling that a fur-lined overcoat indicates the possession of a great deal of money and a doggish tendency to spend it on wine, women, and--well, the singing is not so important in the picture. Whenever we see a man sporting a fur-lined overcoat our first thought is to wonder whether or not his wife has found out about him. Our second is to wish we had a coat like it.
The origin of this curious and somewhat pathetic feeling about fur-lined coats is probably to be found in the days of our adolescence, when we wore deliriously exotic ties and attended the presentations of refined melodrama. We devoted much thought in those days to the subject of masculine attire--possibly with some obscure notion of attracting the weaker sex by the brilliancy of our plumage--and the villain always fascinated while he revolted us. We had much joy of his clothes.
To see the handsome devil swing across the stage with his light but fiendish ha-ha, his cigarette, and the dress-suit which is the national costume of villains, always gave us a thrill which the chaste embraces of the hero and heroine seldom provided. Even to this day we wouldn't give a darn to watch some other fellow hugging a comely young woman.
Usually the villain wore a fur-lined coat at some stage of his hellish machinations--preferably at the height of them, when he was about to boil the heroine's baby, for instance, or was engaged in tying that long-suffering and virtuous lady in the path of the onrushing train. It was at such moments that he threw open the coat loaned by the well-known firm of local furriers--as the programme never forgot to state--and displayed the mink lining of luxurious sin. We always wondered how the heroine found the strength of mind to resist his wicked advances to her.