I can’t recall exactly how many servants we had to wait on us two, but it was about thirty-five. I remember hearing my wife say one month that our meat bill alone was about a thousand dollars. For a time I fancied we were living more grandly than anyone else in town. But it soon revealed itself to me that, as things went with “our class,” we were leading rather a simple life. Certainly nothing we did marked us out from the others in that region. The sum totals suggested that servants stood at the front windows all day long tossing money into the street. But nothing of the kind occurred. You would have said we ate the finest food in wholesale quantities. Yet never did I get a notably good meal at my own house. The coffee was always poor. The fruit was below the average of sidewalk stands. We often had cold-storage fowls and fish on the table. We paid for the best; I’m sure we paid for it many times over. We got—what one always gets when the wife is too intellectual and too busy to attend to her business. But I assure you it was grandly served. The linen and the dishes were royal, the servants were in liveries of impressive color and form—though I could have wished that my wife had been as sensitive to odors as I was, and had compelled some of those magnificent gentry to do a little bathing. Throughout the establishment the same superb scale was maintained. We lived like the rest of the millionaires, neither better nor worse. We lived in grandeur and discomfort. But my wife was ecstatic, and I was therefore content. Yes, we were very grand. And, as in Brooklyn, the glasses came to the table with a certain sour odor not alluring as you lifted them to drink—the odor that causes an observant man or woman to say, “Aha—dirty rags in this perfect lady’s kitchen—dirty rags and all that goes with them.” But only a snarling cynic would complain of these vulgar trifles. There’s always at least a fly leg in the ointment.
“Didn’t I tell you I knew what I was about?” said Edna triumphantly.
“You did,” said I.
“Haven’t we got what we wanted?”
“We have,” said I, perhaps somewhat abruptly, for I was just then wondering how the devil we were going to keep it.
“And if it hadn’t been for me,” proceeded she “we’d still be living in Brooklyn!”
“Or in Passaic,” said I.
“Don’t speak of Passaic,” she cried. “I’m trying to forget it.”
“We were very happy then,” said I.
“I was miserable,” retorted she.