The Man in th·eBrooks Brothers Shirt
Mary McCarthy
THE NEW MAN
who came into the club car was coatless. He was
dressed in gray trousers and a green shirt of expensive material
that had the monogram
"W.B."
embroidered in darker green on
the sleeve. His tie matched the green of the monogram, and his
face, which emerged rather sharply from this tasteful symphony
in cool colors, was blush pink. The greater part of his head ap·
peared to be pink, also, though actually toward the back there was
a good deal of closely cropped pale gray hair that harmonized
with his trousers. He looked, she decided, like a middle-aged baby,
like a young pig, like something in a seed catalogue. In any case,
he was plainly Out of the Question, and the hope that had sprung
up, as for some reason it always did; with the sound of a new step
soft on the flowered Pullman carpet, died a new death. Already the
trip was half over. They were now several hours out of Omaha;
nearly all the Chicago passengers had put in an appearance; and
still there was no one, no one at all. She must not mind, she told
herself; the trip west was of no importance; yet she felt a curious,
shamefaced disappointment, as if she had given a party and no
guests had come.
She turned again to the lady on her left, her
vis-a-vis
at
breakfast, a person with dangling earrings, a cigarette-holder, and
a lorgnette, who was somebody in the New Deal and carried about
with her a typewritten report of the hearings of some committee
which she was anxious to discuss. The man in the green shirt
crowded himself into a loveseat directly opposite, next to a young
man with glasses and loud socks who was reading Negley Farson's
"Way of a Transgressor." Sustaining her end of a well-bred, well–
informed, liberal conversation, she had an air of perfect absorp–
tion and earnestness, yet she became aware, without ever turning
her head, that the man across the way had decided to pick her up.
Full of contempt for the man, for his coatlessness, for his color-
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