Page:The plastic age, (IA plasticage00mark).pdf/213

Rh conform! You dress both your bodies and your minds to some set model. Just at present you are making your hair foul with some sort of perfumed axle-grease; nine tenths of you part it in the middle. It makes no difference whether the style is becoming to you or not; you slick it down and part it in the middle. Last year nobody did it; the chances are that next year nobody will do it, but anybody who does n’t do it right now is in danger of being called wet.”

Hugh had a moment of satisfaction. He did not pomade his hair, and he parted it on the side as he had when he came to college. True, he had tried the new fashion, but after scanning himself care¬ fully in the mirror, he decided that he looked like a “blond wop”—and washed his hair. He was guilty, however, of the next crime mentioned.

“The same thing is true of clothes,” Henley was saying. “Last year every one wore four-button suits and very severe trousers. This year every one is wearing Norfolk jackets and bell-bottomed trousers, absurd things that flop around the shoes, and some of them all but trail on the ground. Now, any one who can’t afford the latest creation or who declines to wear it is promptly called wet.

“And, as I said before, you insist on the same standardization of your minds. Just now it is not au fait to like poetry; a man who does is exceedingly
 * wet, indeed; he is effeminate, a sissy. As a matter