He thought to introduce the subject to Judge Custis, but that fond
bridegroom broke in with:
"Milburn, you're a game fellow. It was impudent in me to say one word
about your hat. I'll get one like it myself if I can find one. Tut, tut,
man! It becomes you. Say no more about it."
Milburn undertook to make the explanation to his niece, but before he
could well begin she cried:
"Uncle Meshach, Aunt Vesta is just in love with your hat! She won't hear
of your wearing any other. We're all going to stand by it, uncle."
A man chooses his own verdict by a long course of behavior; austerity in
the family begets fear; an affectation, whether of folly or resentment,
is at last credited to nature; man is seldom allowed to escape from the
trap of his own temperament.
So Meshach Milburn never obtained the opportunity to relieve himself
from the affliction with which he had afflicted others. Like an impostor
who has established the claim of deafness, and mankind bawls in his ear,
the hatted spectre was made to feel uncomfortable when he put off his
tile--his consistency was at once on trial. He was like a boy who had
pricked a cross upon his hand in India ink, and, growing to be a man
with taste and position, sees the indelible advertisement of his
vulgarity whenever he takes a human hand.
To have put on any other hat would have subjected him to new hoots and
comments, and made himself publicly smile at his own folly; he must have
climbed as high as the pillory to explain the change and make apology;
the society he had faced in defiance seemed all at once united to refuse
him a _status_ without his Entailed Hat, and it would have taken the
courage of throwing off a life-long _alias_ and living under a forgotten
name, to appear in Princess Anne in a new, contemporary head-dress.
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