dies?
You none of you know anything about the cost of things, and you expect
everybody to be _bien mise_ on a halfpenny a day. When Boom saw me at
Ascot this year he stared at me, and whispered to me, 'Oh, I say,
mother! you've got the same bonnet on you had at the Oaks. I do hope the
other fellows won't notice it.' That is how he will speak to his wife
some day; and yet I dare say, like you, he will expect her to get her
bonnets from Virot at ten francs apiece!"

Lady Usk is angry and roused.

"Look at my poor little sister," she goes on. "What a life that brute
Mersey leads her about money! All those dreadfully plain girls to dress,
and nothing to do it on, and yet if they are not all well got up
wherever they go to, he swears he is ashamed to be seen with them. You
can't dress well, you can't do anything well, without spending money;
and if you haven't money you must get into debt. That is as clear as
that two and two are four. When ever do men remember their own
extravagances? You smoke ten cigars a day; your cigars cost a shilling
or eighteenpence each,--that is ten or fifteen shillings a day; five
pounds a week, not counting your cigarettes! Good heavens! five pounds a
week for sheer silly personal indulgence that your doctors tell you will
canker your tongue and dry up your gastric juice! At all events, our
toilets don't hurt our digestion; and what would the world look like if
women weren't well dressed in it? Your cigars benefit nobody, and only
make your teeth yellow."

"Well, in a year they cost about what one ball-gown does that's worn
twice."

"I always wear mine three times, even in London," says Dorothy Usk, with
conscious virtue. "But I don't see any sin in spending money. I think it
ought to be spent. But you are always dragging money-questions into
everything, and Boom says that the Latin person whom you and Lord
Brandolin are always quoting declares most sensibly that money should
always be regarded as a means, never as an end; and if it is to be a
means to anything, must not it be spent before it can become so?"

"That's neither here nor there," replies her lord; "and if Boom only
reads his classics upside down like that he'd better leave 'em alone."

"You are never content. Most men would be delighted if a boy read _at
all_."

"I don't know why, I'm sure," replies Usk, drearily. "Reading's going
out, you know; nobody'll read at all fifty years hence: poking about in
guinea-pigs' stomachs, a