"Oh, yes, it's a nice hat all right," he answered cordially. "Why, those hats cost forty-nine cents each, buying them by the dozen wholesale!"
We tried to ascribe his words to professional jealousy. But somehow we took a sudden scunner against that hat. In fact, we tried a few days later to give it to the office-boy. But he declined. He sports a six-dollar one himself. Besides, his head is bigger than ours.
We have also been looking at some celluloid collars lately—just looking, you understand. Of course, we wouldn't think of wearing one of the things, but it is just as well to keep them in mind, for you never can tell, with the price of laundering where it is. Besides, they aren't so bad—a little blue and shiny, perhaps, and with peculiar button-holes. But with the washer-ladies buying closed cars, and the stringency becoming more stringent all the time, it is well to know of collars that can be done up with a tooth-brush or simply left on the neck when taking a bath.
But we have no intention of wearying the reader with a further account of those symptoms of a financial depression which has long since become chronic with us. We are no more depressed now than we ever were, except inasmuch as any kindly and sensitive heart must be depressed at the sight of widespread destitution—especially among millionaires.
Depression—and when we speak of depression we naturally refer to financial depression and not to the state of a man's liver or conscience—depression, we repeat, is largely a relative matter. A man is depressed or otherwise in comparison with the high-water mark of his prosperity. A financial status which would make the hairs of John D. Rockefeller's Sunday wig rise up in separate and individual horror, might cause us in sheer exuberance of joy to buy and stock a "Winter Garden" just for ourself alone. In view of the jeopardy which would ensue for our eternal salvation, we are glad—or should be that this is not immediately imminent.
It is really the rich who suffer most in a period of stringency. The mental anguish of hardened stringe-ists like ourself is nothing to what must be endured by the people who have never before had to ask the price of anything. We met one of them not long ago on the street. He is not a regular millionaire—only an intermittent, so to speak. Every little while he manages to chin himself on the trapeze of wealth, though he never quite succeeds in climbing securely into it. He was looking very gloomy, his suit needed pressing, and the diamond in his tie seemed smaller and less brilliant than of yore.
"Hello, old pirate, why so glum?" we asked insolently—we always make a point of being rude to millionaires. "What's the trouble?—those naughty stocks misbehaving again, or does some fresh Aleck of a legislator propose to investigate you?"
He looked at us with a melancholy and lack-lustre eye. There was none of the old bounce and condescension in his manner.
"It's all right for you chaps to make bum jokes," he grumbled. "You're on Easy Street. What difference does the depression make to you? You haven't promised a new touring-car to your wife as I did. And now the poor little girl has to worry along on last year's model. And I could only give her a pearl pendant for her birthday instead of the diamond sun-burst she wanted. While you...."
But we hurried away. Far be it from us to stand idly by and gaze upon a strong man's agony. The vision of that defeated and broken man has followed us ever since. Not even the little sunburst she wanted—gawd, can such things be! Why doesn't someone start another war so that he can get back into the munitions business? There must be dozens of others like him. And while these deserving millionaires are in this state of comparative destitution, here are gay, care-free fellows like ourself swaggering about town, jingling the quarter against the small change in our pocket, and wondering whether we will blow it on two cigars or on three. It doesn't seem fair, does it?