extravagant than American men. If
one spends money on beautiful toilets and splendidly dreary
entertainments, the other flings it away on the turf, on cards or
billiards, or in masculine prodigalities still more objectionable. In
most fashionable houses the husband and wife are equally extravagant,
and the candle blazes away at both ends.

To foreigners, the most noticeable extravagance of Americans is in the
matter of flowers. Winter or summer, women of very modest means must
have flowers for their girdle. They will pay fifty cents for a rose or
two when half-dollars are by no means plentiful, and it is such a
pretty womanly taste that no man has the heart to grumble at it; only,
if the women themselves would add up the amount of money spent in this
transitory luxury, say during three months, they would be astonished
at their own thoughtlessness.

For of all pleasures flower-buying is the most evanescent; before the
day is over the fading buds are cast into the refuse cart, and the
money might just as well have been cast into the street.

As for the amount spent in floral displays at weddings, funerals,
theatres, balls, and dinners, it must be presumed that people who thus
waste hundreds of dollars on articles that are useless in a few hours
have the hundreds of dollars to throw away, and that they enjoy the
pastime of making floral ducks and drakes with their money. But if
they do not enjoy it, then why do they not imitate the economy of Beau
Brummel, who, when compelled by his debts to make some sacrifice of
luxuries, resolved to begin retrenchment by curtailing the rose water
for his bath?

Large floral outlays are just as fantastic an extravagance, for though
flowers in moderation are beautiful, in excess they are vulgar, and
even disagreeable. The Greeks, who made no mistakes about beauty and
fitness, contented themselves with a garland and a rose for their wine
cup. They would never have danced and feasted and wedded themselves in
a charnel-house of dying flowers.

Our dressing and dining is done on the same immense scale. Lucullus
might preside at our feasts, and queens envy the jewels and costumes
of our women. Perhaps the size of the country and its transcendent
possibilities in every direction instinctively incite those who have
the means to lavishness of outlay. People who live under bright high
skies, and whose horizons are wide and far-reaching, imbibe a
largeness of expression which is not satisfied