“That’s just a man’s selfishness to want a whole house to himself. Well, I want a parasol which is a parasol, and not an umbrella in winter as well.”
“That’s only a trifle. When we go for excursions in summer we’ll take the car down to the very wharf. You know how mad you get sometimes in summer when I try to persuade you it’s more healthful to walk than to ride.”
“Yes? but we wouldn’t go for excursions. We’d go to Newport—to Europe. You see how prosperity saves bitterness of spirit by making walking altogether unnecessary.” “That’s so—and I’ll get shaved at the barber’s, and we’ll have our portraits done by Aubrey Beardsley or Whistler.”
“Let me see—a box at the opera, the Symphony, flowers—really, there must be more ways of spending money than we’ve thought of.”
“The only things I can think of are first editions, Posters—and English ties.”
“Then I’ll tell you what. You must set to work and write a manual on ‘How to Spend Money’ at once, or we shall be perfectly miserable and distracted with the consciousness of a lack of yearnings when we get our million.”
“That’s so; the best way to learn anything is to write a book about it—and perhaps this may be as true of spending a million as of anything else.”
And so it has come about that I am to engage in the labor of compiling a companion volume to Benjamin Franklin’s admirable Poor Richard book of precepts on economy and the wise conduct of life. It appears to be almost as much needed for people who lack the spending faculty and imagination.
A lifetime of narrow and thrifty living has almost entirely unfitted us for a life of luxury, and chilled and benumbed our imaginations. There must be other persons of severe and simple tastes who have happened to strike ten, and want to live up to it, and to such my “Lucky Richard’s Manual” will appeal as a sort of moral salvation. It will be indispensable and invaluable, and it will be sold at a price that will put it within the reach of persons of modest means as well as of those who have struck ten. Everybody in America has his own scheme for making and spending a million, and mine will be sure to be of comparative interest and value, for I have only been rich in dreams. Like the “Proverbial Philosophy,” “Lucky Richard” will find a million readers. Walter Blackburn Harte.