My personal habits are careful, regular and somewhat luxurious.  I bathe always once and generally twice a day.  Incidentally I am accustomed to scatter a spoonful of scented powder in the water for the sake of the odor.  I like hot baths and spend a good deal of time in the Turkish bath at my club.  After steaming myself for half an hour and taking a cold plunge, an alcohol rub and a cocktail, I feel younger than ever; but the sight of my fellow men in the bath revolts me.  Almost without exception they have flabby, pendulous stomachs out of all proportion to the rest of their bodies.  Most of them are bald and their feet are excessively ugly, so that, as they lie stretched out on glass slabs to be rubbed down with salt and scrubbed, they appear to be deformed.  I speak now of the men of my age.  Sometimes a boy comes in that looks like a Greek god; but generally the boys are as weird-looking as the men.  I am rambling, however.  Anyhow I am less repulsive than most of them.  Yet, unless the human race has steadily deteriorated, I am surprised that the Creator was not discouraged after his first attempt.

I clothe my body in the choicest apparel that my purse can buy, but am careful to avoid the expressions of fancy against which Polonius warns us.  My coats and trousers are made in London, and so are my underclothes, which are woven to order of silk and cotton.  My shoes cost me fourteen dollars a pair; my silk socks, six dollars; my ordinary shirts, five dollars; and my dress shirts, fifteen dollars each.  On brisk evenings I wear to dinner and the opera a mink-lined overcoat, for which my wife recently paid seven hundred and fifty dollars.  The storage and insurance on this coat come to twenty-five dollars annually and the repairs to about forty-five.  I am rather fond of overcoats and own half a dozen of them, all made in Inverness.

I wear silk pajamas—­pearl-gray, pink, buff and blue, with frogs, cuffs and monograms—­which by the set cost me forty dollars.  I also have a pair of pearl evening studs to wear with my dress suit, for which my wife paid five hundred and fifty dollars, and my cuff buttons cost me a hundred and seventy-five.  Thus, if I am not an exquisite—­which I distinctly am not—­I am exceedingly well dressed, and I am glad to be so.  If I did not have a fur coat to wear to the opera I should feel embarrassed, out of place and shabby.  All the men who sit in the boxes at the Metropolitan Opera House have fur overcoats.

As a boy I had very few clothes indeed, and those I had were made to last a long time.  But now without fine raiment I am sure I should be miserable.  I cannot imagine myself shabby.  Yet I can imagine any one of my friends being shabby without feeling any uneasiness about it—­that is to say, I am the first to profess a democracy of spirit in which clothes cut no figure at all.  I assert that it is the man, and not his clothes, that I value; but in my own case my silk-and-cotton undershirt is a necessity, and if deprived of it I should, I know, lose some attribute of self.