Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 141, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 June 1920 — CITY CLOTHES [ARTICLE]

CITY CLOTHES

By B. K. JONES

(©, 1110. by McClure Newspaper Syndicate.!

To the residents of Holmes Renter who had assembled fit the little railroad station one late June afternoon there was nothing extraordinary or unconventional In the fact that Gladys Brock and George Ogden, the blue-eyed young school teacher and the school principal to whom she had been for some time engaged, should be Journeying away alone together, un. chaperoned and unescorted. Yet the journey consumed fortyeight hours, and neither Gladys nor deorge had friends at their destination. One glance at the rural pedagogues as they boarded the train there at Holmes Center would have disarmed even the most suspicious Madame Grundys. —The clothes they wore and the way they wore them, quite as much as their frank, eager young faces, would have reassured. Gladys wore a dark pleated skirt, and, as every one knows, the full-pleated skirt In whatever mode needs some brevity to be effective. But Holmes Center had escaped the Paris revival of the abbreviated skirt, and Gladys, sensible Gladys, would have worn hers long anyway. v. It seemed prodigal to her to have a new skirt cut off short when long skirts might come back into fashion, and you never could make a skirt longer that had once been turned up short. She wore a machine embroidery white shirtwaist of the sort that retail at Holmes Center even In prevailing high pricerfor two ninety-eight, and by way ot a wrap that she might possibly need she carried over her arm a neatly folded woolen scarf. The mail-order catalogue had assured that these scarfs were taking the place of separate jackets, hence Gladys had invested In one for her projected trip. And George —well, he wasn’t dressed like a wild Westerner nor like your notion of a farmer or hayseed. His suit was of a conventional shade of gray and his hat was not much behind the style—but from the angle at which that hat was worn to the thick black polish that he had applied to his own heavy-soled shoes that morning you would have known at a glance that he was not one to be at home in the city of more than 20.000. They were going to one of the big cities, where a large university attracted hundreds of men and women maturer than their regular students to drink at-dheir wells of learning for six or seven weeks in the summer. George was going to finish the work needed to complete his requirements for the degree that he had started to earn at a rural college some years before, and Gladys was going to take a course in “household administration” —with the double purpose of taking the promotion the following autumn to the position of domestic science teacher in Holmes Center high school, and even more important consideration, of subsequently making herself the sort of housewife that she felt so worthy a person as George Ogden deserved. They had read the catalogue of the big university together, and together they had made their plans. Tilby had figured expenses, too. for neither wanted to cut too deep in their little hoard of savings that had been put aside to feather the nest in another year or so when they should be married. _ George, because he was going to take more courses, .would have the greater expense, and to help defray this he had determined to do some sort of work In the city, although the university authorities advised those taking a full course of summer work not to attempt to add to their burdens in the hot weeks of midsummer by doing outside work. They had 'dreamed of these weeks together in the great center of learning, and if the picture they had formed of that center was dissimilar, at least neither had come any nearer the reality than the other.

As both had pictured, they felt that they would see much more of each other than actually proved to be the case. For after they had gone •together from the terminal in the great city to the university in the outskirts and each had gone to the dormitory where rooms had been secured in advance, it was never by chance that they met. -Their work lay in buildings quite remote. Their dining halls were as distant, and even the social activities that were conducted under’entirely different management They were farther apart than they would have been had Gladys lived in Holmes Center and George two counties off. George took the only work that offered itself—that of clerical assistant to the night clerk of one of the downtown hotels —so there was little leisure for George and Gladys to go about together and, as they never seemed to meet by chance in the great university center, sometimes days went by when their only means of intercourse was by way of a daily exchanged letter. Meantime Gladys was experiencing what amounted to nothing more nor less than a sartorial conversion. She was converted from the prejudices and circumscriptions of Holmes Center to the dress creed of the city. This did not mean that she went to extreme la matters of dress, but It did

mean that In place of her long, full dark skirt and separate white “shirtwaists” she adopted the one-piece cotton frocks worn by the young wom- . en of the summer school, and relegating the woolen scarf to the bottom of her trunk she invested in a knitted silk jacket, such as five out of every ten of the younger women students wore. ‘ ’ Her feather-trimmed best hat that she had worn with her from Holmes Center abditated in favor of a simple straw sailor that proved immensely becoming worn over her soft brown curls and shading her truly lovely blue eyes. All of which might not have proved so difficult to tell George had It not been to order to buy the knitted silk jacket, the simple sailor which had a fairly high price attached to it In spite of its simplicity, and the little silk afternoon dress and white pumps and sntin slippers, she had dipped into that little hoard and actually had spent enough of It to mean possibly the sacrifice of that parlor suit she had been planning on. That made it seem almost treachery to George. Besides George, dear, trusting George, had liked her always just as she was.— He would not understand. The day after her transformation Gladys did not see George. He was working late that night and had no spare afternoory hours. She was glad that there was no Interview because until she became used to the new situation —that of wearing smart city clothes instead of clumsy country clothes —she felt that she would show her self-conscious-ness. . --

Of course she would not wear the clothes when she saw him. So when the next day they met for an hour together toward the close of a fine summer afternoon Gladys was arrayed In her Holmes Center getup. It had been only two days before that she discarded it. yet it seemed not too long to her, and she *hesitated to look at herself in the glass. She did not want to know how she had looked. She was sitting on a bench in one of the city parks where she and George had arranged to meet. First she was conscious of her own awkward appearance. Then she looked up to see George approach her. Could that be her George? she wondered. Before she had never noticed how badly his suit had fitted, nor had she realized how impossibly his shoes -were shaped. He wore his hat at an uncitifled angle. She was tempted to pull it into a better position. George must have seen her look of disappointment, for he could not conceal his embarrassment. He sat beside her on the bench. Then a wave of contrition came over Gladys. He looked tired and anxious. He had been working hard, very hard and it was all for her. Gladys could not express the contrition she felt, for she did not want George even to know the cause of it. They tried to talk of their work, but it was so widely diverse that they seemed not to interest each other. The affairs of Holmes Center were too remote to be interesting. And the worst of it was that when Gladys returned to her dormitory room and had again donned her city clothes she felt something almost akin to contempt for the clothes of her George. Could it be a contempt for George? . Then a feeling of homesickness came over her. She wished she had never come to the city to experience Its temptations,’and this was followed by a great longing—a longing to remain

always in the city, never to go back • to the clothes of Holmes Center. There was a faculty reception that evening—the first opportunity she had had to meet out of class the men and women from whom she was receiving instruction. To go to this reception and enter into the festivity it offered would be to forget at least for a few hours the disturbing emotions of the afternoon. Gladys found herself that evening noticing the clothes the men wore and the way they wore them. And always there was the image of George in his bagging suit, out-of-date shoes and badly poised hat What if she had never known him? There was no doubt of the fact that the young instructor who was talking to her was interested in her. He had already asked to call to see her at the dormitory. Then among th effaces Gladys caught a glimpse of one that could be ho one’s but George’s. In a few Ininutes more he had come up to her. The interested professor had withdrawn of his own accord, and they were standing there in a quiet corner of the college gymnasium. “George!” “Gladys 1” t ~ There was Infinite relief in the tone of each.\ Neither had known that the other was coming. But now the truth ■was known, and explanations were almost unnecessary. You see, George had taken a tumble. He had realized that to get on a man needs to think something of the way he dresses. He had gbne ahead and got the new things, and had tried to wear them the way the men did with whom he Then it had occurred to him that Gladys might not understand. He had dipped in just a little to the fund he was saving for . their little cottage. But he intended shortly to pay it back. So he had done, the cowardly thing and had donned the old things when he met her that afternoon. Oh, of course, he loved her just the same in those Holmes Center togs, but, “Gladys, girl, you sure are a winner in these citified togs,” he told her, and Gladys quite forgot her interested young Instructor, ’