Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/202

 He picked up a copy of the "New York Herald," lying on the table. "There's our friend George in New York," he said, "having more trouble with that pesky French brother-in-law of his. The little Paris fortune hunter has already cost his wife's estate fifteen or twenty million francs and—no returns outside of a few babies. Yet French brother-in-law could make a tall income if he were put to 'work right,' as they say in the wild and woolly, for he has a most tremendous eye for color effects, that chap. If he were my brother-in-law, I would starve the cuss into becoming a man-milliner, the first of the world. That's what he could be, and ought to be with clever management.

"My word," continued Mark, "you ought to see him drive in state in the Bois de Boulogne. When I first clapped eyes on his flunkies and outriders, in their liveries, rich yet soft in color effects, I almost yearned to be one of them for the sake of their fine togs."

Indeed, sensational clothes were always Mark's hobby. Hence the white suits he wore in his reclining days, and the sealskin coat, with the fur outside, that adorned him in his days of youthful glory. I am quite sure he would have gone to bed in his Oxford mantle and cap if he had had more than one of each, and the passing of his red hair was a real grievance to him, he told Gyp, the French novelist whom he called, "warm, yet not torrid." 198