My personal habits are careful, regular and somewhat luxurious. I bathe
always once and generally twice a day. Incidentally I am accustomed to
scatter a spoonful of scented powder in the water for the sake of the
odor. I like hot baths and spend a good deal of time in the Turkish bath
at my club. After steaming myself for half an hour and taking a cold
plunge, an alcohol rub and a cocktail, I feel younger than ever; but
the sight of my fellow men in the bath revolts me. Almost without
exception they have flabby, pendulous stomachs out of all proportion to
the rest of their bodies. Most of them are bald and their feet are
excessively ugly, so that, as they lie stretched out on glass slabs to
be rubbed down with salt and scrubbed, they appear to be deformed. I
speak now of the men of my age. Sometimes a boy comes in that looks like
a Greek god; but generally the boys are as weird-looking as the men. I
am rambling, however. Anyhow I am less repulsive than most of them. Yet,
unless the human race has steadily deteriorated, I am surprised that the
Creator was not discouraged after his first attempt.

I clothe my body in the choicest apparel that my purse can buy, but am
careful to avoid the expressions of fancy against which Polonius warns
us. My coats and trousers are made in London, and so are my
underclothes, which are woven to order of silk and cotton. My shoes cost
me fourteen dollars a pair; my silk socks, six dollars; my ordinary
shirts, five dollars; and my dress shirts, fifteen dollars each. On
brisk evenings I wear to dinner and the opera a mink-lined overcoat, for
which my wife recently paid seven hundred and fifty dollars. The storage
and insurance on this coat come to twenty-five dollars annually and the
repairs to about forty-five. I am rather fond of overcoats and own half
a dozen of them, all made in Inverness.