FANCIES IN BOOTS 



over the incident. Anyone who reads this and who 

 knows him should ask him to tell it his own way ; 

 perhaps it will sound better than the way I tell it! 

 By the way, from that time on clothes were always a 

 great fancy with me, and boots too. In fact it may be 

 said that these were my real extravagances, but when 

 I was making money freely there was always a pleasure 

 in looking at something in value I had for it. Some 

 of my earnings in 1897 were left with London tailors, 

 and after 1898 I nearly always had my clothes and 

 boots built for me in England. 



In the newspaper interviews, when they wanted to 

 poke fun at me, the reporters would say that I never 

 travelled without more than a dozen trunks and that 

 they were all full of clothes. As a matter of fact I 

 never took more than three ; but considering the size 

 of the garments I wore there could be a lot of clothes 

 stowed away in them! Certainly I was fanciful 

 about shoes and would carry a dozen or eighteen pairs 

 on a journey of any length. I had a joke one night 

 when there was a supper-party in my apartments at 

 the Imperial Hotel in Broadway, New York, where I 

 lived for some years. A parcel had just come home 

 and had not been unpacked : brown shoes, evening 

 pumps, and a lot of other shoes. The company, 

 especially the girls, were anxious to see what was inside 

 the big cardboard box and I let them open it to satisfy 

 their curiosity. My size was and is about one and 

 a half. Of course the girls at once wanted some of 

 these new shoes as something out of the ordinary, 

 something quite different to anything they had had' 

 but I was quite safe when I said to them : " Any of 

 you who can get a pair on her feet, is quite welcome 

 to take them home with her." 



They all had a try but by no sort of persuasion or 



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