“Oh no, he didn’t,” Mrs. Baxter laughed.  “He didn’t quite!”

“He had to go up-stairs,” said Jane.  And as the stricken listener above smote his forehead, she added placidly, “He tore a hole in his clo’es.”

She seemed about to furnish details, her mood being communicative, but Mrs. Baxter led the way into the “living-room”; the hall was vacated, and only the murmur of voices and laughter reached William.  What descriptive information Jane may have added was spared his hearing, which was a mercy.

And yet it may be that he could not have felt worse than he did; for there is nothing worse than to be seventeen and to hear one of the Noblest girls in the world told by a little child that you sat on the cakes and tore a hole in your clo’es.

William leaned upon the banister railing and thought thoughts about Jane.  For several long, seething moments he thought of her exclusively.  Then, spurred by the loud laughter of rivals and the agony of knowing that even in his own house they were monopolizing the attention of one of the Noblest, he hastened into his own, room and took account of his reverses.

Standing with his back to the mirror, he obtained over his shoulder a view of his trousers which caused him to break out in a fresh perspiration.  Again he wiped his forehead with the handkerchief, and the result was instantly visible in the mirror.

The air thickened with sounds of frenzy, followed by a torrential roar and great sputterings in a bath-room, which tumult subsiding, William returned at a tragic gallop to his room and, having removed his trousers, began a feverish examination of the garments hanging in a clothes-closet.  There were two pairs of flannel trousers which would probably again be white and possible, when cleaned and pressed, but a glance showed that until then they were not to be considered as even the last resort of desperation.  Beside them hung his “last year’s summer suit” of light gray.

Feverishly he brought it forth, threw off his coat, and then—­deflected by another glance at the mirror—­began to change his collar again.  This was obviously necessary, and to quicken the process he decided to straighten the bent collar-button.  Using a shoe-horn as a lever, he succeeded in bringing the little cap or head of the button into its proper plane, but, unfortunately, his final effort dislodged the cap from the rod between it and the base, and it flew off malignantly into space.  Here was a calamity; few things are more useless than a decapitated collar-button, and William had no other.  He had made sure that it was his last before he put it on, that day; also he had ascertained that there was none in, on, or about his father’s dressing-table.  Finally, in the possession of neither William nor his father was there a shirt with an indigenous collar.