ne among them? They want
what they want, and not something which seems to them less desirable,
but they open their purses and--frequently with some amused uncertainty
as to the differences between sovereigns and half-sovereigns, florins
and half-crowns--they pay their bills with something almost like glee.
They are remarkably prompt about bills--which is an excellent thing, as
they are nearly always just going somewhere else, to France or Germany
or Italy or Scotland or Siberia. Those of us who are shopkeepers, or
their salesmen, do not dream that some of them have incomes no larger
than our own, that they work for their livings, that they are teachers
journalists, small writers or illustrators of papers or magazines that
they are unimportant soldiers of fortune, but, with their queer American
insistence on exploration, and the ignoring of limitations, they have,
somehow, managed to make this exultant dash for a few daring weeks or
months of freedom and new experience. If we knew this, we should
regard them from our conservative standpoint of provident decorum as
improvident lunatics, being ourselves unable to calculate with their odd
courage and their cheerful belief in themselves. What we do know is that
they spend, and we are far from disdaining their patronage, though most
of them have an odd little familiarity of address and are not stamped
with that distinction which causes us to realise the enormous difference
between the patron and the tradesman, and makes us feel the worm
we remotely like to feel ourselves, though we would not for worlds
acknowledge the fact. Mentally, and in our speech, both among our equals
and our superiors, we condescend to and patronise them a little, though
that, of course, is the fine old insular attitude it would be un-British
to discourage. But, if we are not in the least definite concerning the
position and resources of these spenders as a mass, we are quite sure of
a select number. There is mention of them in the newspapers, of the
town houses, the castles, moors, and salmon fishings they rent, of
their yachts, their presentations actually at our own courts, of their
presence at great balls, at Ascot and Goodwood, at the opera on gala
nights. One staggers sometimes before the public summing-up of the
amount of their fortunes. These people who have neither blood nor rank,
these men who labour in their business offices, are richer than our
great dukes, at the realising of whose wealth an