Let me be honest in the matter.  I own some masterpieces of great value.  At the time of their purchase I thought I had a keen admiration for them.  I begin to suspect that I acquired them less because I really cared for such things than because I wished to be considered a connoisseur.  There they hang—­my Corots, my Romneys, my Teniers, my Daubignys.  But they might as well be the merest chromos.  I never look at them.  I have forgotten that they exist.  So have the rest of my family.

It is the same way with my porcelains and tapestries.  Of course they go to make up the tout ensemble of a harmonious and luxurious home, but individually they mean nothing to me.  I should not miss them if they were all swept out of existence tomorrow by a fire.  I am no happier in my own house than in a hotel.  My pictures are nothing but so much furniture requiring heavy insurance.

It is somewhat the same with our cuisine.  My food supply costs me forty dollars a day.  We use the choicest teas, the costliest caviar and relishes, the richest sterilized milk and cream, the freshest eggs, the choicest cuts of meat.  We have course after course at lunch and dinner; yet I go to the table without an appetite and my food gives me little pleasure.  But this style of living is the concrete expression of my success.  Because I have risen above my fellows I must be surrounded by these tangible evidences of prosperity.

I get up about nine o’clock in the morning unless I have been out very late the night before, in which case I rest until ten or later.  I step into a porcelain tub in which my servant has drawn a warm bath of water filtered by an expensive process which makes it as clear and blue as crystal.  When I leave my bath my valet hands me one by one the garments that have been carefully laid out in order.  He is always hovering round me, and I rather pride myself on the fact that I lace my own shoes and brush my own hair.  Then he gives me a silk handkerchief and I stroll into my upstairs sitting room ready for breakfast.

My daughters are still sleeping.  They rarely get up before eleven in the morning, and my wife and I do not, as a rule, breakfast together.  We have tried that arrangement and found it wanting, for we are slightly irritable at this hour.  My son has already gone downtown.  So I enter the chintz-furnished room alone and sit down by myself before a bright wood fire and glance at the paper, which the valet has ironed, while I nibble an egg, drink a glass of orange juice, swallow a few pieces of toast and quaff a great cup of fragrant coffee.

Coffee!  Goddess of the nerve-exhausted!  Sweet invigorator of tired manhood!  Savior of the American race!  I could not live without you!  One draft at your Pyrenean fountain and I am young again!  For a moment the sun shines as it used to do in my boyhood’s days; my blood quickens; I am eager to be off to business—­to do, no matter what.