“It’s appalling to me,” said the man.

“Yes,” said the other, “and there’s never any end to it.  You think you know it all, but you find you really know very little.  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 acquaintances you heard of similar incredible things; a tiny antique Persian rug, which could be folded into an overcoat pocket, for ten thousand dollars; a set of five “art fans,” each blade painted by a famous artist and costing forty-three thousand dollars; a crystal cup for eighty thousand; an edition de luxe of the works of Dickens for a hundred thousand; a ruby, the size of a pigeon’s egg, for three hundred thousand.  In some of these great New York palaces there were fountains which cost a hundred dollars a minute to run; and in the harbour there were yachts which cost twenty thousand a month to keep in commission.