EXTRAVAGANCE.
Extravagance is the besetting sin of New York society. Money is thrown away. Fortunes are spent every year in dress, and in all sorts of follies. Houses are furnished and fitted up in the most sumptuous style, the building and its contents often being worth over a million of dollars.
[Illustration: A Fashionable Thief—Shoplifting.]
People live up to every cent of their incomes, and often beyond them. It is no uncommon occurrence for a fine mansion, its furniture, pictures, and even the jewels and clothes of its occupants, to be pledged to some usurer for the means with which to carry on this life of luxury. Each person strives to outdo the rest of his or her acquaintances. The rage for fine houses and fine clothes is carried to an amazing extent, and to acquire them, persons of supposed respectability will stoop to almost any thing. Of late years, a number of fashionable ladies have been detected in dry-goods stores in the act of purloining fine laces, embroideries, and other goods, and concealing them under their skirts.