hATS aRE fOR pRINCIPLED pEOPLE*

In passing the man in the hat passed many people, many of whom wore hats, felt, wicker, corduroy and some stitched from flaps of canvas and oilcloth. He once saw a woman wearing a calfskin hat with a squirrel’s tail and a plastic bauble sewn into the crest. She, too, had a gamy leg which she dragged to one side like a weigh anchor. She also had a dog, a cross between a poodle and a foxhound, with tiny misshapen ears and a sharp pointed muzzle covered with wiry gray hair. She dragged it behind her like a dinghy, the dog sidling along the pavement, tiny legs like matchsticks, its ears cocked to one side, the leash garroting its neck like a gallows. Hats are for people with manners, he thought, not the unprincipled and shifty. He had a hankering to snatch the hat from atop her head, and then throw it into the gutter like a stray animal. But as he had better things to do, principled things that required manners and tenet, not shiftiness and connivance, he did not. His, the man in the hat’s, was a decent conscientious life, not one dross with bad manners and opprobrium.