dandy

Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor - the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery - and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham.

A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.

He with the cleanest clothes isn__ necessarily the cleanest.

What did she think she understood about him? His gorgeous appearance was only the first layer, yet it was one that she savored now as if she had been hungry for it all of her life. _ wealth of lace and silk on a man was something she had always taken for granted. It spoke of power and social status, vital to the structure of society. Yet Alden had turned it into something elseHis appearance was both beautiful and witty, almost as if he celebrated the irony of hiding masculine muscle beneath such essentially feminine frippery. For a woman to put her hand on a man's sleeve and feel the hard tension of his arm beneath the silk was intensely erotic. Perhaps no age had ever been as blatantly sensual as this one. No wonder men like Alden reveled in it, reaping woman after woman like a scythe harvesting flowers.

Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which psychoanalysis is powerless to bestow.

For with dandies, a joke is the only way of making yourself respected.

My darling love, I think you have a fundamental misconception about what it means to be a great dandy. I have better taste than anyone else so I don't care what anyone else thinks about anything. I am right and they are wrong.