“Would that make up well?” I ask him.

“Admirably,” he answers.

I have no real reason to doubt it.  I have never seen any reason why cloth should not make up well.  But I always ask the question as I know that he expects it and it pleases him.  There ought to be a fair give and take in such things.

“You don’t think it at all loud?” I say.  He always likes to be asked this.

“Oh, no, very quiet indeed.  In fact we always recommend serge as extremely quiet.”

I have never had a wild suit in my life.  But it is well to ask.

Then he measures me—­round the chest, nowhere else.  All the other measures were taken years ago.  Even the chest measure is only done—­and I know it—­to please me.  I do not really grow.

“A little fuller in the chest,” my tailor muses.  Then he turns to his assistant.  “Mr. Jennings, a little fuller in the chest—­half an inch on to the chest, please.”

It is a kind fiction.  Growth around the chest is flattering even to the humblest of us.

“Yes,” my tailor goes on—­he uses “yes” without any special meaning—­“and shall we say a week from Tuesday?  Mr. Jennings, a week from Tuesday, please.”

“And will you please,” I say, “send the bill to—?” but my tailor waves this aside.  He does not care to talk about the bill.  It would only give pain to both of us to speak of it.

The bill is a matter we deal with solely by correspondence, and that only in a decorous and refined style never calculated to hurt.

I am sure from the tone of my tailor’s letters that he would never send the bill, or ask for the amount, were it not that from time to time he is himself, unfortunately, “pressed” owing to “large consignments from Europe.”  But for these heavy consignments, I am sure I should never need to pay him.  It is true that I have sometimes thought to observe that these consignments are apt to arrive when I pass the limit of owing for two suits and order a third.  But this can only be a mere coincidence.

Yet the bill, as I say, is a thing that we never speak of.  Instead of it my tailor passes to the weather.  Ordinary people always begin with this topic.  Tailors, I notice, end with it.  It is only broached after the suit is ordered, never before.

“Pleasant weather we are having,” he says.  It is never other, so I notice, with him.  Perhaps the order of a suit itself is a little beam of sunshine.

Then we move together towards the front of the store on the way to the outer door.

“Nothing to-day, I suppose,” says my tailor, “in shirtings?”

“No, thank you.”

This is again a mere form.  In thirty years I have never bought any shirtings from him.  Yet he asks the question with the same winsomeness as he did thirty years ago.

“And nothing, I suppose, in collaring or in hosiery?”

This is again futile.  Collars I buy elsewhere and hosiery I have never worn.