“Oh, nonsense,” laughed Watts.  “That’s too thin.  Come off that roof.  Unless you’re guardian of some bewitching girl?”

“Your ward, Peter?”

“Yes.  I don’t know whether I can make you understand it.  I didn’t at first.  You see I became associated with the ward, in people’s minds, after I had been in politics for a few years.  So I was sometimes put in positions to a certain extent representative of it.  I never thought much how I dressed, and it seems that sometimes at public meetings, and parades, and that sort of thing, I wasn’t dressed quite as well as the other men.  So when the people of my ward, who were present, were asked to point me out to strangers, they were mortified about the way I looked.  It seemed to reflect on the ward.  The first inkling I had of it was after one of these parades, in which, without thinking, I had worn a soft hat.  I was the only man who did not wear a silk one, and my ward felt very badly about it.  So they made up a purse, and came to me to ask me to buy a new suit and silk hat and gloves.  Of course that set me asking questions, and though they didn’t want to hurt my feelings, I wormed enough out of them to learn how they felt.  Since then I’ve spent a good deal of money on tailors, and dress very carefully.”

“Good for ‘de sixt’!  Hurrah for the unwashed democracy, where one man’s as good as another!  So a ‘Mick’ ward wants its great man to put on all the frills?  I tell you, chum, we may talk about equality, but the lower classes can’t but admire and worship the tinsel and flummery of aristocracy.”

“You are mistaken.  They may like to see brilliant sights.  Soldiers, ball-rooms or the like, and who does not?  Beauty is aesthetic, not aristocratic.  But they judge people less by their dress or money than is usually supposed.  Far less than the people up-town do.  They wanted me to dress better, because it was appropriate.  But let a man in the ward try to dress beyond his station, and he’d be jeered out of it, or the ward, if nothing worse happened.”

“Oh, of course they’d hoot at their own kind,” said Watts.  “The hardest thing to forgive in this world is your equal’s success.  But they wouldn’t say anything to one of us.”

“If you, or Pell, or Ogden should go into Blunkers’s place in my ward, this evening, dressed as you are, or better, you probably would be told to get out.  I don’t believe you could get a drink.  And you would stand a chance of pretty rough usage.  Last week I went right from a dinner to Blunkers’s to say a word to him.  I was in evening dress, newcastle, and crush hat—­even a bunch of lilies of the valley—­yet every man there was willing to shake hands and have me sit down and stay.  Blunkers couldn’t have been dressed so, because it didn’t belong to him.  For the same reason, you would have no business in Blunkers’s place, because you don’t belong there.  But the men know I dressed for a reason, and came to the saloon for a reason.  I wasn’t putting on airs.  I wasn’t intruding my wealth on them.”