tle. Just think of
the number of people there are trying to go the pace! They say there
are seven thousand millionaires in this country, but I say there are
twenty thousand in New York alone--or if they don't own a million,
they're spending the income of it, which amounts to the same thing. You
can figure that a man who pays ten thousand a year for rent is paying
fifty thousand to live; and there's Fifth Avenue--two miles of it, if
you count the uptown and downtown parts; and there's Madison Avenue,
and half a dozen houses adjoining on every side street; and then there
are the hotels and apartment houses, to say nothing of the West Side
and Riverside Drive. And you meet these mobs of people in the shops and
the hotels and the theatres, and they all want to be better dressed
than you. I saw a woman here to-day that I never saw in my life before,
and I heard her say she'd paid two thousand dollars for a lace
handkerchief; and it might have been true, for I've been asked to pay
ten thousand for a lace shawl at a bargain. It's a common enough thing
to see a woman walking on Fifth Avenue with twenty or thirty thousand
dollars' worth of furs on her. Fifty thousand is often paid for a coat
of sable, and I know of one that cost two hundred thousand. I know
women who have a dozen sets of furs--ermine, chinchilla, black fox,
baby lamb, and mink and sable; and I know a man whose chauffeur quit
him because he wouldn't buy him a ten-thousand-dollar fur coat! And
once people used to pack their furs away and take care of them; but now
they wear them about the street, or at the sea-shore, and you can
fairly see them fade. Or else their cut goes out of fashion, and so
they have to have new ones!"

All that was material for thought. It was all true--there was no
question about that. It seemed to be the rule that whenever you
questioned a tale of the extravagances of New York, you would hear the
next day of something several times more startling. Montague was
staggered at the idea of a two-hundred-thousand-dollar fur coat; and
yet not long afterward there arrived in the city a titled Englishwoman,
who owned a coat worth a million dollars, which hard-headed insurance
companies had insured for half a million. It was made of the soft
plumage of rare Hawaiian birds, and had taken twenty years to make;
each feather was crescent-shaped, and there were wonderful designs in
crimson and gold and black. Every day in the casual conversation of
your