reflect that while he lived they never failed to have
Champagne at his dinner-parties; and that they had three men to wait at
table on such occasions, while Mr. Smith, next door, had never more than
one and a maidservant. If such idiotic women would but look forward, and
consider how all this must end! If the professional man spends all he
earns, what remains when the supply is cut off; when the toiling head
and hand can toil no more? Ah, a little of the economy and management
which must perforce be practised after _that_ might have tended
powerfully to put off the evil day. Sometimes the husband is merely the
careworn drudge who provides what the wife squanders. Have you not known
such a thing as that a man should be laboring under an Indian sun, and
cutting down every personal expense to the last shilling, that he might
send a liberal allowance to his wife in England; while she meanwhile
was recklessly spending twice what was thus sent her; running up
overwhelming accounts, dashing about to public balls, paying for a
bouquet what cost the poor fellow far away much thought to save,
giving costly entertainments at home, filling her house with idle and
empty-headed scapegraces, carrying on scandalous flirtations; till
it becomes a happy thing, if the certain ruin she is bringing on her
husband's head is cut short by the needful interference of Sir Cresswell
Cresswell? There are cases in which tarring and feathering would soothe
the moral sense of the right-minded onlooker. And even where things are
not so bad as in the case of which we have been thinking, it remains
the social curse of this age, that people with a few hundreds a year
determinedly act in various respects as if they had as many thousands.
The dinner given by a man with eight hundred a year, in certain regions
of the earth which I could easily point out, is, as regards food, wine,
and attendance, precisely the same as the dinner given by another man
who has five thousand a year. When will this end? When will people
see its silliness? In truth, you do not really, as things are in this
country, make many people better off by adding a little or a good deal
to their yearly income. For in all probability they were living up to
the very extremity of their means before they got the addition; and in
all probability the first thing they do, on getting the addition, is so
far to increase their establishment and their expense that it is just
as hard a struggle as ever