"Well, dear, it's so much newer than Shakespeare," she asserted triumphantly. "I don't suppose that it will last quite as long—I could not say that, Archie—but while it is selling, it may as well sell for five dollars. Nobody ever thinks of competing with Shakespeare. I'm very proud of your Lives of Great Men though you have never read any of it to me."
"Perhaps that's why," I suggested, temporarily moody, as most genius is said to be.
"You're a silly boy, and I'm not going to flatter you by telling you how much more interested I am in Archibald Fairfax than in William Shakespeare. You shall read me your Lives of Great Men as soon as we have our cook. In the meantime, I'm so glad you have decided not to save. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die. It is hard to do those three things, at a seventy-five-cent table-d'hôte."
"And the 'to-morrow we die' doesn't seem so hard?"
"No, it doesn't, really, Archie. The way we are living now is enough to drive anybody to pessimism. It is unnatural; it is wrong; we will spend our money, and be happy."
There is one certain thing about New York. You can get anything you want in that "tuberosity of civilized life" if you have the wherewithal, or, in other words, "the price." It is what Europeans call the middle classes that suffer the most in the American metropolis, whereas in other capitals, it is they that are the happiest. The extremely indigent and the inflatedly wealthy never complain of New York City. It is the neither-rich-nor-poor who find life difficult and are unable to gratify the innate need for refinement and comfort; who discover that graceful life is a knotty problem, and that the art of "keeping up appearances" with moderate means is well-nigh impossible. New York is the Mecca of the rich and the poor; it is the Hades of the unhappy medium. Those who are just "comfortable" in London, are "just uncomfortable" in New York.
So we set about the discovery of an expensive cook. We pored over the advertisements in the daily papers, in a determined hunt for something eminently first-class. Letitia rather fancied an "Alsatian chef" who had been with the "finest families in Europe and America," and modestly asked one hundred dollars per month, but I felt suspicious.
"You remember, dear," I said warningly, "that Mrs. Potzenheimer came or did not come from the Vanderbilts. At any rate, she said she did. You probably recall the fact that the Duchess of Marlborough fancied her cooking."
"Let bygones be bygones," remarked Letitia solemnly. "Archie, don't be mean."