Mr. Pole shook his head seriously.  The ladies were thankful for the presence of Mr. Barrett.  And lo! this man was in perfect evening uniform.  He looked as gentlemanly a visitor as one might wish to see.  There was no trace of the poor organist.  Poverty seemed rather a gold-edge to his tail-coat than a rebuke to it; just as, contrariwise, great wealth is, to the imagination, really set off by a careless costume.  One need not explain how the mind acts in such cases:  the fact, as I have put it, is indisputable.  And let the young men of our generation mark the present chapter, that they may know the virtue residing in a tail-coat, and cling to it, whether buffeted by the waves, or burnt out by the fire, of evil angry fortune.  His tail-coat safe, the youthful Briton is always ready for any change in the mind of the moody Goddess.  And it is an almost certain thing that, presuming her to have a damsel of condition in view for him as a compensation for the slaps he has received, he must lose her, he cannot enter a mutual path with her, if he shall have failed to retain this article of a black tail, his social passport.  I mean of course that he retain respect for the article in question.  Respect for it firmly seated in his mind, the tail may be said to be always handy.  It is fortune’s uniform in Britain:  the candlestick, if I may dare to say so, to the candle; nor need any young islander despair of getting to himself her best gifts, while he has her uniform at command, as glossy as may be.

The ladies of Brookfield were really stormed by Mr. Barrett’s elegant tail.  When, the first glass of wine nodded over, Mr. Pole continued the discourse of the morning, with allusions to French cooks, and his cook, their sympathies were taken captive by Mr. Barrett’s tact:  the door to their sympathies having been opened to him as it were by his attire.  They could not guess what necessity urged Mr. Pole to assert his locked-up self so vehemently; but it certainly made the stranger shine with a beautiful mild lustre.  Their spirits partly succumbed to him by a process too lengthened to explain here.  Indeed, I dare do no more than hint at these mysteries of feminine emotion.  I beg you to believe that when we are dealing with that wonder, the human heart female, the part played by a tail-coat and a composed demeanour is not insignificant.  No doubt the ladies of Brookfield would have rebutted the idea of a tail-coat influencing them in any way as monstrous.  But why was it, when Mr. Pole again harped on his cook, in almost similar words, that they were drawn to meet the eyes of the stranger, on whom they printed one of the most fabulously faint fleeting looks imaginable, with a proportionately big meaning for him that might read it?  It must have been that this uniform of a tail had laid a basis of equality for the hour, otherwise they never would have done so; nor would he have enjoyed the chance of showing them that he could respond to the remotest mystic indications, with a muffled adroitness equal to their own, and so encouraged them to commence a language leading to intimacy with a rapidity that may well appear magical to the uninitiated.  In short, the man really had the language of the very elect of polite society.  If you are not versed in this alphabet of mute intelligence, you are in the ranks with waiters and linen-drapers, and are, as far as ladies are concerned, tail-coated to no purpose.