The Passing of the Idle Rich

by Frederick Townsend Martin

The fond owner of a diminutive black-and-tan dog gave a banquet in honour of the animal. The dog was worth, perhaps, fifty dollars. The festivities were very gay. The man’s friends came to his dinner in droves, the men in evening clothes and the women bedecked in shimmering silks and flashing jewels. In the midst of the dinner, the man formally decorated his dog with a diamond collar worth fifteen thousand dollars. It contained seven hundred small brilliants, varying in weight from one sixth to one carat. The guests shouted their approval, and the dinner was regarded as a huge success.

The leader of a wealthy clique in a Western city was struck with a unique idea. He was tired of spending money. There was nothing new for which to spend it. He gave a “poverty social.” The thirty guests came to his palatial home in rags and tatters. Scraps of food were served on wooden plates. The diners sat about on broken soap boxes, buckets, and coal-hods. Newspapers, dust cloths, and old skirts were used as napkins, and beer was served in a rusty tin can, instead of the conventional champagne. They played being poor for one night, and not one of them but joined in ecstatic praise of their host and his unusual ability to provide a sensation.

A bored individual with a fondness for gems covered as much of his person as possible with diamonds. When he walked abroad, he flashed and sparkled in the sunlight. He, also, became the possessor of a happy inspiration. He went to his dentist and had little holes bored in his teeth, into which the tooth expert inserted twin rows of diamonds. He had found another way of spending money.

A Southern millionaire purchased an imported motor car. It cost him twelve thousand dollars when it came off the ship. He looked at it in scorn and called in decorators. The car was refitted completely. It was equipped with two diminutive rooms, a living apartment, and a sleeping room. Hot and cold water fixtures were put in and space was found for a small bath-tub. A kitchen with a full equipment of cooking utensils was added, and, when the various tradesmen and mechanics completed their work, the car resembled a complete and luxuriously furnished home on wheels. The original cost of twelve thousand dollars had been brought up to thirty thousand and the owner was temporarily contented.

Very young and very wealthy was the young man whose attentions to an embryonic actress amused a community a few years back. It was the young man’s opinion that he was desperately in love with the lady, who in later years married a publisher of songs. The millionaire youngster showered the girl with gifts. He gave her rings, bracelets, necklaces, and diamond-studded combs for her black tresses until she glistened from head to foot. The very buttons of her gloves were diamonds and her shoes were fastened with monster pearls. The question of taste never entered into the situation. It was simply the spending of money and the bedecking of a coarse, but crafty, stage girl. In three years, she succeeded in throwing away almost a million dollars for the deluded youngster, at the end of which time they parted.

At the conclusion of an elaborate affair in New York City, the guests leaned back in their chairs to listen to the singers. The cigarettes were passed around. Oddly enough, the banquet had not been marked until that moment, and, as the host was famous for the unusualness of his dinners, many of the diners were disappointed. Their disappointment gave way to admiration. Each cigarette was rolled, not in white paper, but in a one hundred dollar bill and the initials of the host were engraved in gold letters. This strange conceit was applauded until the voices of the singers struggled amid the uproar.

A member of the idle rich rumbled along a Jersey highway in his motor car. He approached an excavation where workmen were manœuvring cranes and hoists. At the side of the road lay a dying horse. It had fallen into a hole and two of its legs were broken. The workmen were waiting for the arrival of a policeman to put the suffering animal to death.

“I’ll save that horse,” decided the wealthy motorist. His decision was simply an idle whim. When the policeman came, the motorist had already bought the useless horse for a ten dollar bill. He procured an ambulance and had the animal removed to his own stable. He summoned the foremost veterinarians in New York and the crippled work horse was patched up. For weeks it hung suspended in a sling and finally the broken bones knitted and the horse hobbled about. The veterinarians demanded five thousand dollars for their work and were paid without complaint. In his stoutest days, the saved horse was worth no more than a hundred dollars.

A well known metropolitan spender has an annual bill of some ten thousand dollars for shoes alone. His order stands in every manufactory in America and Europe. Whenever a new style of men’s shoes is designed, a sample pair is immediately shipped to him. He cannot possibly wear a tenth of the shoes sent to him, but he has the satisfying knowledge that he is never behind the style.

The wife of a Western man owns a pet monkey. The little beast lives in a private room and is constantly attended by a valet. It rides abroad behind its private trotter, has its own outfit of clothes, its dining table, and a bed made of solid ivory, tipped with gold ornaments. All told, perhaps a dozen human beings minister to the comfort of the little simian and the mistress cheerfully pays from ten to fifteen thousand dollars yearly on this one extravagance. She became dissatisfied with the dining service in the monkey-room of her home, and her pet now eats its meals off solid silver plates.