Every day in the year many a suddenly enriched family is busy about the same enterprise. Families from the less fashionable parts of the city moving to the fashionable parts. Families from other cities and towns—east, west, north, and south—advancing to social conquest under the leadership of mammas and daughters tired of shining in obscure, monotonous, and unappreciative places. There are I forget how many thousands of millionaires on Manhattan Island; enough, I know, with the near millionaires and those living like millionaires, to make a city of three or four hundred thousand, not including servants and parasites. Not all of these have the fashionable craze; at least, they haven’t it in its worst form—the form in which it possessed my wife. All the acute sufferers must find suitable lodgments near Fifth Avenue if not in it.
Now New York is ever ready to receive and to “trim” the arriving millionaire. It has all kinds of houses and apartments to meet the peculiarities of his—or, rather, of his wife’s and daughter’s—notions of grandeur. It has a multitude of purveyors of furnishings and decorations likewise designed to catch crude and grandiose tastes. My wife was busy with these gentry.
“Don’t you think we’d better go a little slow?” said I. “Why not live in a hotel on Manhattan and look about us?”
I had respect for my wife’s capacity at the woman side of the game; she had thoroughly drilled me to more than generous appreciation of it. But at the same time I was not so blinded by her charm for me or so convinced by her insistent and plausible egotism that I had not noted certain minor failures of hers due to her ignorance of the art of spending money. She was clever at learning. But often her vanity lured her into fancying she knew, when in fact her education in that particular direction was all miseducation. She dressed much more giddily in our first years in Brooklyn than she did afterwards. And in the later years she made still further discoveries as to dress that resulted in another revolution, away from quietness, not toward the gaudy but toward smartness—that curious quality which makes a woman’s toilet conspicuous without the least suggestion of the loud.
However, Edna scorned my suggestion that she make haste slowly. She had long been engaged in a thorough study of the mode of life in millionairedom. Newspapers, Sunday supplements, magazines, and society novels had helped her. She had examined the exteriors of the famous palaces. She had got into the drawing-rooms and ballrooms of two or three palaces by way of high-priced charity tickets. She had in one instance roamed into sitting rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms until caught and led back by some vigilant and unbribable servant. I wonder if she ever recalls that adventure now! Probably not. I think I have recorded her ability absolutely to forget whatever it pleases her not to remember. She had been educating herself, so when I suggested caution, she replied:
“Don’t you fret, Godfrey. I know what I’m about. I’ll get what we’ve got to have.”
And I’ll concede that she did—also, that I thought it overwhelmingly grand at the time. It was a house in a fashionable side street, between Madison avenue and Fifth—a magnificent house built for exactly such a family as mine. That is, it was built entirely for show and not at all for comfort; it fairly bristled with the luxuries and “modern conveniences,” but most of them were of the sort that looks comfortable but is not. The rent was some preposterous sum—thirty-five or forty thousand a year. We had room enough for the housing of nearly a hundred people, counting servants as people, which I believe is not the custom. It was fitted throughout in the fashion which those clever leeches who think out and sell luxuries have in all ages imposed upon the rich man because it means money in their pockets. Once in a while you find a rich man who has the courage to live as he pleases, but most of them live as the fashion commands. And many of them have no idea that there is any less comfortless and less foolish way to live. You imagine, gentle reader, that people with money live in beauty and comfort. You imagine that you could do it also if you had but the wealth. Believe me, you deceive yourself. Beyond question a certain amount of money is necessary to the getting of attractive and comfortable surroundings. But there is another, an equally indispensable and a far rarer factor. That factor, gentle reader, is intelligence—knowledge of the resources of civilization, knowledge of the realities as to comfort, luxury, and taste.
I am tempted to linger upon the details of the extravagance of that first big establishment of Edna’s. It was so astounding and so ridiculous. I saw that she had delivered us and our fortune over to hordes of crafty, thirsty bloodsuckers—merchants, tradesmen, servants. But her heart was set upon it, and all other rich people were living in that same way. “You want to do the right thing by Margot, don’t you?” said she.
“By you and Margot,” said I. “Go ahead. I guess I can find the money.”
I shan’t here go into the ways I discovered or invented for finding that money. They were not too scrupulous, but neither were they commercially dishonorable. I must smile there. Being of an inquiring and jocose mind I have often tried to find an action that, in the opinion of the most eminent commercial authorities, was absolutely dishonorable. Never yet have I found a single action, however wrong and even criminal in general, that they would not declare in certain circumstances perfectly honorable. And those “certain circumstances” could always be boiled down to the one circumstance—needing the money.