The Reign of Gilt

by David Graham Phillips

But, on the other hand, perhaps his discovery of his insignificance does not discourage him, but only serves to rouse him to greater efforts. His close inspection of the palaces and performances of the fashionable and extravagant rich has fired his imagination and energy. In that case he does not marry. “I am too poor,” he says, as he looks at his paltry income of five thousand a year and thinks on the humble ménage it would maintain, and remembers that his poorest married acquaintances up in the Fifth avenue or Lake Drive district have fifteen thousand a year and cannot afford to entertain or to keep a carriage, and are always fretting about money. He considers what a “decent” hat or dress for a woman costs, and—well, his tailor’s bill was seven hundred dollars last year and he has almost no clothes. He remembers his bills for the few small and very modest dinners he gave—a week’s earnings gone in a few minutes and the dinner a poor affair beside the poorest he has had at the houses of his rich acquaintances. To console himself for his heroic sacrifice of sentiment to ambition, he takes a somewhat better apartment for his bachelor self in a more fashionable apartment house—his rent is twelve hundred a year. He works hard downtown; he continues to work hard uptown. He works as cleverly in the one quarter as in the other. He is always seen with rich people; he belongs to fashionable clubs; he dines in palaces; he goes for Saturday-to-Monday visits at great, extravagantly maintained country houses; he is seen in boxes at the opera, at the horse show; he expands his tastes and his expenditures with his rapidly expanding income. His “fixed charges” are now fifteen thousand a year—very moderate for a man of his associations.

In addition to these absolute necessities he spends about fifteen thousand more upon presents and entertaining. Half a dozen men living in the apartment house he lives in spend twice as much as he does and do not consider themselves, and are not considered, either extravagant or dissipated.

He is making a great deal of money, but he feels—and is—poor. However, he is sustained and soothed by the certainty of riches immediately ahead. He has been spending, but it has been in the nature of an investment—a most judicious investment from the standpoint of his purposes. And presently his cleverness and audacity and “large ideas” have their reward; and then he marries.

She has tastes which are exactly his. She is willing to marry him because she has not made the success she and her mother dreamed of and strove for. She has some money—their joint income, while not imposing as New York incomes go, is still large enough to enable them to make “a decent start in life,” as their “set” interprets life.

Presently we find them installed in a “small” house or “little” apartment—the rent is more than ten thousand a year, and they have twelve servants. His skill as a money-maker is talked about; her dresses are admired and envied; their equipages, their surroundings, their dinners are models of luxurious good taste. As both are shrewd managers, their forty thousand a year enables them to seem to be spending twice that amount. They are in the high-road of plutocratic happiness and are creditably charioted. And as the years pass, their increasing wealth rolls up on itself as large wealth has a habit of doing. They annually tour the multi-millionaire circuit in great state—North Carolina, Hempstead, the Hudson, London, Paris, Newport. They have children.

No healthier, rosier, more intelligent children can be found anywhere than theirs. They have the best care that competent nurses and governesses can give. They live by the clock, are fed the most expensive and at the same time the most sensible food. They are dressed in a manner that makes plain mothers blink and stare. There are only two of them and the elder is only seven, but their clothing bill last year was fourteen hundred. It will be less, much less, as they grow older, for it is not good form to dress boys and girls extravagantly—at least not yet. They speak French and German as fluently as they speak English, and far more correctly. They have everything for mind and body—except the direct constant care of their mother. They have everything—that money can buy.

Let us go back to the cross-roads and take a candidate for success who, when he achieved his modest five thousand a year, married and went to live in a flat or small suite in an apartment hotel of the kind that would have been called luxurious a dozen years ago, but is now third-class. Let us assume that his wife, whether she came from out-of-town or from the city, is the typical present-day big-city woman of extravagant ideas—is, like her husband, wealth-crazy and luxury-crazy and society-mad.

In all probability they will have no children. Children are not popular among the extravagant in New York—dogs are less expensive, less troublesome, fully as affectionate and far less unfashionable. The extravagant rich still tolerate children, possibly because of a quaint, made-in-England theory that aristocratic families should maintain the “family line.” But “climbers” cannot afford the necessary time and money. It was Swift—was it not?—who first called attention to the fact that the attitude in climbing and in crawling is the same.

Our young climber is busy all day downtown—busy making money. His wife is busy uptown—busy spending the money he makes, or as much of it as she can threaten or wheedle away from him. She falls into a set of young married women with husbands and tastes like hers. They, like their husbands, think only of wealth and extravagance. And while they wait for their dreams to come true they invest every cent they can lay their hands upon in an imitative vain show.

Our young man’s wife reads the fashionable intelligence with her coffee. She presently goes forth as fashionably dressed as if their income were three or four times what it is. She walks in fashionable streets or sits in some fashionable restaurant, there to view and study and envy the fashionable women she reads about. She “shops” in the fashionable millinery and dressmaking establishments—not to buy, but to steal hints for the use of her own cheaper milliner and dressmaker in getting together her imitation costumes. She strives to model her person, her dress, her walk, her conduct, her conversation upon the conception of what is fashionable in the multi-millionaire’s set.