“Yes, there was one. He also was the son of a freedman, and came nearly a century after Virgil and Horace, in the reign of the infamous Domitian. His name was Juvenal, and he wrote satires in which he flayed the aristocracy of the empire for their vileness and materialism. I once published a novel, ‘The Metropolis,’ in which I did the same thing for the so-called ‘Four Hundred’ of New York; and it is interesting to compare the two pictures—”
“Now don’t you start talking about your own books!” cries Mrs. Ogi.
“I don’t offer ‘The Metropolis’ as literature, but merely as a record of things I saw in New York twenty years ago. Afterwards I’ll show what Juvenal has to say on the same topics. First, ‘The Metropolis,’ page 278, listing the health-cures of ladies in high society:
“One of the consequences of the furious pace was that people’s health broke down very quickly; and there were all sorts of bizarre ways of restoring it. One person would be eating nothing but spinach, and another would be living on grass. One would chew a mouthful of soup thirty-two times; another would eat every two hours, and another only once a week. Some went out in the early morning and walked barefooted in the grass, and others went hopping about the floor on their hands and knees to take off fat. There were ‘rest cures’ and ‘water cures,’ ‘new thought’ and ‘metaphysical healing’ and ‘Christian Science’; there was an automatic horse, which one might ride indoors, with a register showing the distance traveled. Montague met one man who had an electric machine, which cost thirty thousand dollars, and which took hold of his arms and feet and exercised him while he waited. He met a woman who told him she was riding an electric camel!
“But of course they could not really succeed in reducing weight, because they were incapable of self-restraint. Mrs. Billy Alden gave Montague a delightfully malicious account of a certain lordly fat lady of her set, who had got the Turkish-bath habit. Terrible to encounter, most awful in visage, she would enter the baths by night, and all the attendants would rush into instant action. ‘She delights in perspiring with great tumult,’ said Mrs. Billy. ‘And when her arms have sunk down, wearied with the heavy dumb-bells, the sly masseur omits to rub down no part of her person. Meantime, perhaps there are a number of guests assembled for dinner at home. They wait, overcome with drowsiness and hunger. At last the lady comes, flushed, and declaring that she is thirsty enough for a whole ‘magnum.’ As soon as she is seated at the table, the footman brings her a bucket of ice, packed about her own special quart of champagne. She drinks half of this before she tastes any food—calling it an appetizer. She drinks so much that it won’t stay down, but returns as a cascade on the floor’—and Montague had to stop Mrs. Billy in her too vivid description of the sights which a certain unhappy banker, the husband of this lady, had to witness at his dinner-parties. Said Mrs. Billy, with her usual vividness of metaphor: ‘It is like a snake that has crawled into a cask of wine; it takes in and gives out again.’”
Mrs. Ogi interrupts. “There is one thing I want to make plain—that you weren’t married to me when you published that disgusting stuff.”
“All right,” says Ogi; “it shall be entered in the record. But you must understand that I am not to blame for Mrs. Billy’s stories.”
“You were to blame for the company you kept,” declares Mrs. Ogi. “I call that sort of writing inexcusable.”
“Well, I’ll try again,” says her husband. “On page 351 of ‘The Metropolis’ you find a glimpse of the underworld of New York:
“So far had the specialization in evil proceeded that there were places of prostitution which did a telephone business exclusively, and would send a woman in a cab to any address; and there were high-class assignation-houses, which furnished exquisite apartments and the services of maids and valets. And in this world of vice the modern doctrine of the equality of the sexes was fully recognized; there were gambling-houses and pool-rooms and opium-joints for women, and drinking-places which catered especially to them. In the ‘orange room’ of one of the big hotels, you might see rich women of every rank and type, fingering the dainty leather-bound and gold-embossed wine cards. In this room alone were sold over ten thousand drinks every day; and the hotel paid a rental of a million a year to the Devon estate. Not far away the Devons also owned negro-dives, where, in the early hours of the morning, you might see richly gowned white women drinking.