You can breakfast with me at a quarter past six, and we'll come down together." As Arthur walked homeward he pictured himself in jumper and overalls on his way from work of an evening--meeting the Whitneys--meeting Janet Whitney! Like all Americans, who become inoculated with "grand ideas," he had the super-sensitiveness to appearances that makes foreigners call us the most snobbishly conventional people on earth.

What would it avail to be in character _the_ refined person in the community and in position _the_ admired person, if he spent his days at menial toil and wore the livery of labor?
He knew Janet Whitney would blush as she bowed to him, and that she wouldn't bow to him unless she were compelled to do so because she had not seen him in time to escape; and he felt that she would be justified.

The whole business seemed to him a hideous dream, a sardonic practical joke upon him.

Surely, surely, he would presently wake from this nightmare to find himself once more an unimperiled gentleman.
In the back parlor at home he found Adelaide about to set out for the Whitneys.

As she expected to walk with Mrs.Whitney for an hour before lunch she was in walking costume--hat, dress, gloves, shoes, stockings, sunshade, all the simplest, most expensive-looking, most unpractical-looking white.