The pride and admiration with which she pronounced this undeniable truth might have been thought tactless, but Penrod, not analytical, found his spirits somewhat elevated.  No mirror was in his range of vision and, though he had submitted to cursory measurements of his person a week earlier, he had no previous acquaintance with the costume.  He began to form a not unpleasing mental picture of his appearance, something somewhere between the portraits of George Washington and a vivid memory of Miss Julia Marlowe at a matinee of “Twelfth Night.”

He was additionally cheered by a sword which had been borrowed from a neighbor, who was a Knight of Pythias.  Finally there was a mantle, an old golf cape of Margaret’s.  Fluffy polka-dots of white cotton had been sewed to it generously; also it was ornamented with a large cross of red flannel, suggested by the picture of a Crusader in a newspaper advertisement.  The mantle was fastened to Penrod’s shoulder (that is, to the shoulder of Mrs. Schofield’s ex-bodice) by means of large safety-pins, and arranged to hang down behind him, touching his heels, but obscuring nowise the glory of his facade.  Then, at last, he was allowed to step before a mirror.

It was a full-length glass, and the worst immediately happened.  It might have been a little less violent, perhaps, if Penrod’s expectations had not been so richly and poetically idealized; but as things were, the revolt was volcanic.

Victor Hugo’s account of the fight with the devil-fish, in “Toilers of the Sea,” encourages a belief that, had Hugo lived and increased in power, he might have been equal to a proper recital of the half hour which followed Penrod’s first sight of himself as the Child Sir Lancelot.  But Mr. Wilson himself, dastard but eloquent foe of Harold Ramorez, could not have expressed, with all the vile dashes at his command, the sentiments which animated Penrod’s bosom when the instantaneous and unalterable conviction descended upon him that he was intended by his loved ones to make a public spectacle of himself in his sister’s stockings and part of an old dress of his mother’s.

To him these familiar things were not disguised at all; there seemed no possibility that the whole world would not know them at a glance.  The stockings were worse than the bodice.  He had been assured that these could not be recognized, but, seeing them in the mirror, he was sure that no human eye could fail at first glance to detect the difference between himself and the former purposes of these stockings.  Fold, wrinkle, and void shrieked their history with a hundred tongues, invoking earthquake, eclipse, and blue ruin.  The frantic youth’s final submission was obtained only after a painful telephonic conversation between himself and his father, the latter having been called up and upon, by the exhausted Mrs. Schofield, to subjugate his offspring by wire.