The Metropolis

And along with this went a perfectly incredible increase in luxury and extravagance. "You are surprised at what you see here to-day," said she — "but take my word for it, if you were to come back five years later, you'd find all our present standards antiquated, and our present pacemakers sent to the rear. You'd find new hotels and theatres opening, and food and clothing and furniture that cost twice as much as they cost now. Not so long ago a private car was a luxury; now it's as much a necessity as an opera-box or a private ballroom, and people who really count have private trains. I can remember when our girls wore pretty musUn gowns in summer, and sent them to wash; now they wear what they call lingerie gowns, dimity en princesse, with silk embroidery and real lace and ribbons, that cost a thousand dollars apiece and won't wash. Years ago when I gave a dinner, I invited a dozen friends, and my own chef cooked it and my own servants served it. Now I have to pay my steward ten thousand a year, and nothing that I have is good enough. I have to ask forty or fifty people, and I call in a caterer, and he brings everything of his own, and my servants go off and get drunk. You used to get a good dinner for ten dollars a plate, and fifteen was something special; but now you hear of dinners that cost a thousand a plate! And it's not enough to have beautiful flowers on the table — you have to have 'scenery'; there

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must be a rural landscape for a background, and goldfish in the finger-bowls, and five thousand dollars' worth of Florida orchids on the table, and floral favours of roses that cost a hundred and fifty dollars a dozen. I attended a dinner at the Waldorf last year that had cost fifty thousand dollars; and when I ask those people to see me, I have to give them as good as I got. The other day I paid a thousand dollars for a table-cloth !"

"Why do you do it.?" asked Montague, abruptly.

"God knows," said the other; "I don't. I sometimes wonder myself. I guess it's because I've nothing else to do. It's like the story they tell about my brother — he was losing money in a gambUng-place in Saratoga, and someone said to him, ' Davy, why do you go there — don't you know the game is crooked.?' 'Of course it's crooked,' said he, 'but damn it, it's the only game in town!'"

"The pressure is more than anyone can stand," said Mrs. Alden, after a moment's thought. "It's like trying to swim against a current. You have to float, and do what everyone expects you to do — your children and your friends and your servants and your tradespeople. All the world is in a conspiracy against you."

" It's appalhng to me," said the man.

"Yes," said the other, "and there's never any end to it. You think you know it all, but you find you really know very httle. Just think of the number of people there are trying to go the pace! They say there are seven thousand

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millionaires in this country, but I say there are twenty thousand in New York alone — or if they don't own a million, they're spending the income of it, which amounts to the same thing. You can figure that a man who pays ten thousand a year for rent is paying fifty thousand to live; and there's Fifth Avenue — two miles of it, if you count the uptown and downtown parts; and there's Madison Avenue, and half a dozen houses adjoining on every side street; and then there are the hotels and apartment houses, to say nothing of the West Side and Riverside Drive. And you meet these mobs of people in the shops and the hotels and the theatres, and they aU want to be better dressed than you. I saw a woman here to-day that I never saw in my hfe before, and I heard her say she'd paid two thousand dollars for a lace handkerchief; and it might have been true, for I've been asked to pay ten thousand for a lace shawl at a bargain. It's a common enough thing to see a woman walking on Fifth Avenue with twenty or thirty thousand dollars' worth of furs on her. Fifty thousand is often paid for a coat of sable, and I know of one that cost two hundred thousand. I know women who have a dozen sets of furs — ermine, chinchilla, black fox, baby lamb, and mink and sable; and I know a man whose chauffeur quit him because he wouldn't buy him a ten-thousand-dollar fur coat! And once people used to pack their furs away, and take care of them; but now they wear them about the street, or at the sea-shore, and you can fairly see them fade. Or else their cut goes but

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of fashion, and so they have to have new

ones!"