A week later another expert mentioned in print that no man who had any self-respect wore collars with sharp corners.

Kidger is not a manual worker.  He reduced his cigarette allowance and bought some round-cornered ones, white as before.  And then his aunt directed the poor fellow’s attention to a paragraph by an authority signing himself “The Colonel,” which stated that none but the profiteer was wearing white collars, and that you might know the man who had done his bit by the fact that he wore a blue one with slightly rounded corners, accompanied by a self-coloured tie of a darker shade, tied in a neat butterfly bow.

This was a blow to Kidger, but he resigned from his golf club and laid in some haberdashery in accordance with “The Colonel’s” orders.  Recommendations would be too mild a word.  I saw the paragraph—­most peremptory.

But in a rival paper “Brigadier” mentioned only three days later that none but the most noxious bounder and tout would be found dead in a blue collar with a white shirt.  Kidger saw the truth of this at once; he had receptivity if not intuition.  After a trying interview with his banker he bought several blue shirts.

Then the General who contributes “Sartorial Tips” to several leading journals remarked that, since all kinds of people were wearing coloured shirts and collars, the man who desired to retain or achieve that touch of distinction which means so much must at any cost wear white ones; and that, further, Society was frowning on the slovenly unstarched neck-wear of the relapsed temporary gentleman.

Kidger began to show signs of neurasthenia.  His stock of pre-war collars was exhausted, or rather eroded.  His faithful aunt, however, remembered a neglected birthday and gave him a dozen new ones, of the up-and-down model, to save Kidger’s delicate neck.  These, with his nice butterfly-bow ties, looked really well, and Kidger recovered his old form.

I warned him to keep to the police and Parliamentary news in the papers, but his eyes would wander.  The result was that he learned from “Brigade Major” that the wearing of a butterfly bow with a double event collar was a solecism past forgiveness or repentance, and that its smart appearance was the deadly bait which caught the miserable bumpkin who ignorantly fancied that a man could dress by the light of nature.

Kidger collapsed.  His aunt volunteered to sell her annuity and help him, but the innate nobility of the man forbade him to accept this useless sacrifice.

His medical attendant tells me that he is now allowed to read only poetry, wearing a sweater meanwhile, and that arrangements are being made for him to join a sheep-farming cousin in Patagonia, where collars are despised and newspapers invariably out of date.

W.K.H.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  She. “I TOLD ’EE TO GREASE THE WHEELS AFORE WE COME OUT.”