To the American woman the diamond is not an object of luxury, it is an object of prime necessity. An English old maid would do without her tea before an American woman would go without diamonds.
Oh, those diamonds in America! You see them wherever you go! Not one woman in a hundred will you see without a pair of them in her ears. It is an obsession.
Diamonds, at night with evening dress and artificial light, are things of beauty: but diamonds in the street with morning dress, at early breakfast in company with morning wrappers; diamonds in the ears, at the neck, in the bonnet-strings, on arms, on fingers, diamonds all day long and everywhere, it is a remnant of savagery. Nay, I saw diamonds on shoe-buckles one day in broad day in a shop.
"There is a woman who is not afraid of tripping and losing her diamonds," said I to myself; "but perhaps she got them the same way that she might have lost them. Certainly she cannot be a lady." However, it appears she was, and a well-known figure in New York Society. So I was told by the manager of the establishment, who was at the time showing me over his magnificent rooms.
If good style consists in not doing what the vulgar do, good style in America ought to consist for one thing in not wearing diamonds—unless democracy should demand this sign of equality.
Diamonds are worn by the woman of fashion, the tradesman's wife, shop-girls, work-girls, and servants; and if you see a shabbily-dressed woman who has not a pair in her ears, you may take it for granted that she has put them in pawn.
Naturally, in America, as elsewhere, all that sparkles is not diamond.
When you see diamonds in the ears of shop-girls and factory-girls, they are sham gems bought with well-earned money, or real ones bought with badly-earned money.
I have seen pretty women completely disfigure themselves by hanging enormous diamonds in their ears. These ear-drops had a very high commercial value; but artistic value, none. There is a defect, which seems to exist everywhere in America—a disposition to imagine that the value of things is in proportion to their size.