“The deuce we are!” says George. “I wanted to go to the club. I detest Bayne, anyhow.”
“Yes, but he’s President of the Security Trust. If you want to get their new contract, you’d best dine, and get him to promise you. I’ve already lunched her, so the ground’s prepared.”
“Oh, very well,” growls George; “of course you’re right. I’ll be on hand.”
Result: They cement a friendship with two odious people whom they are afterward obliged to invite; but George gets the contract, and twenty thousand goes down to the family bank account. This spirit is by no means unknown in English and Continental life, but certainly it has its origin and prime exponents in America. No other people finds money sufficient exchange for perpetual boredom.
The European goes where he is amused, with friends who interest him. He dares. The American does not; having always to prove that he can afford to be in certain places, that he is of sufficient importance to be with certain people. America is full of ruinously expensive resorts that have sprung up in response to this craving for self-advertisement on the part of her “rising” sons and daughters. Squads of newspaper reporters go with them, and the nation is kept accurately informed to the minute as to what Mrs. Spender wore this morning at Palm Beach, Mrs. Haveall at Newport, Mrs. Dash at Hot Springs; also how many horses, motor cars, yachts and petty paraphernalia Charles Spender, Jimmy Haveall, and Henry Dash are carrying about. The credit of these men, together often with the credit of large business firms, depends on the show they can afford to make, and the jewels their wives wear.
But I believe that no man has a duller life than the rich man—or the moderately rich man of New York. He is generally the victim of dyspepsia—from too rich food taken in too great a hurry; he is always the victim of the office. Not even after he has retired, to spend the remainder of his days in dreary luxury between his clubs and Continental watering places, does the office habit cease to torment him. Once and forever, it has murdered the enjoyment of leisure and annihilated pleasure in peace.
Being naturally heavy-minded on all subjects except business, the American man with time on his hands is in a pitiable plight. I have met some of these poor gentlemen, wandering helplessly about the world with their major-general wives, and I must say they are among the most pathetic of married men. They hibernate in hotel lounges, smoking their enormous cigars and devouring their two-weeks-old New York newspapers; or, when they get the chance, monologuing by the hour on their past master strokes in the land where “things hum.” Sometimes in self-defence against the wife’s frocks and French hats, they have a hobby: ivories, or old silver—something eminently respectable. If so, they are apt to be laborious about it, as they are about all culture which they graft on themselves, or have grafted on them. Sometimes they turn their attention to sport; but the real sport of the American, man and woman, is climbing. It is born in them, and they never actually give it up until they die.
Meanwhile the couple who have resisted divorce and continued to climb together turn anxious eyes on the upward advance of their children. If the latter make a false step, mother with her trained wit must repair it; father must foot the bill. No more extravagantly indulgent parent exists than the American parent who himself has had to make his own way. His children are monarchs, weightedly crowned with luxuries they do not appreciate; and for them he slaves till death or nervous prostration lays him low. One wonders when the nation that has lost its head over the American girl will awake to the discovery of the American father. For the present he is a silent, deprecatory creature, toiling unceasingly six days of the week, and on the seventh to be found in some unfrequented corner of the house, inundated by newspapers, or unobtrusively building blocks in the nursery—where there is one.
As a rule, American children own the house, monopolize the conversation at meals, which almost invariably they take with their elders—whether there are guests or not, and are generally as arrogant and precocious little tyrants as unlimited indulgence and admiration can make them. They have been allowed to see and read everything their parents see and read; they have been taken to the theatre and about the world, from the time they could walk; they have, many of them, travelled abroad, and are ready to discuss Paris or London with the languid nonchalance of little old men and women; on the whole, these poor spoiled little people, through no fault of their own, are about as unpleasant and unnatural a type as can be found.
Instead of being kept simple and unsophisticated they are early inculcated with the importance of money and the things it can buy. American boys, rather than vying with one another in tennis or swimming vie with one another in the number of motor cars they own or sail-boats or saddle-horses, as the case may be. They would scorn the pony that is the English boy’s delight, but it is true that many young Americans at the tender age of twelve own their own motors, which they drive and discuss with the blasé air of men of the world. In like fashion the little girls, from the time they can toddle, are consumed with the idea of outdressing one another; and even give box parties and luncheons—beginning, almost before they are out of the cradle, to imitate their mothers in ambition and the consuming spirit of competition.