Читать книгу The Reign of Gilt онлайн

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Ten years ago this family had only a small house in town—small by comparison—and the beautiful palace on the Ocean Drive at Newport. But they do not feel that they are now extravagant. Wherever they go they find people of their own set and a good many “rank outsiders” doing the same things they are doing; and they find many doing things they would think far beyond their means.

For example, a man has just paid two hundred and eighty thousand dollars for a string of pearls for his wife. Our multi-millionaire regards that as an extravagance. He thinks his own wife’s string, which cost one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, represents the limit of prudent expenditure for such a purpose. And those of their friends whom they regard as comparatively poor—the people with from fifty to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year—are pushing them on by concentrating where they scatter. They meet different groups of these moderately rich people at different points in their annual round; and each group is living almost as well as, in some respects better than, they are at that particular point. True, So-and-So’s house in town is a trivial twenty-room affair on a side street, but his place in Newport (he concentrates upon it) is far finer than their Newport place. Smith is decently housed in town and at Newport, but lives in a tiny doll’s house in Curzon street during the London season. Jones is modest in America and England, but how he does blaze on the Riviera!