In the smart set of New York, and in other places _mutatis mutandis_,
this shows itself in an appallingly vulgar and ostentatious display of
mere purchase power. We are expected to find something grand in the
fact that an entertainment costs so much; there is little recognition
of the truth that a man who spends $100 where $10 would meet all the
demands of good taste is not only a bad economist, but essentially
bourgeois and _torné_ in soul. Even roses are vulgarised, if that be
possible, by production in the almost obtrusively handsome variety
known as the "American Beauty," and by being heaped up like hay-stacks
in the reception rooms. At a recent fashionable marriage in New York
no fewer than 20,000 sprays of lily of the valley are reported to have
been used. A short time ago a wedding party travelled from Chicago to
Burlington (Iowa) on a specially constructed train which cost £100,000
to build; the fortunes of the heads of the few families represented
aggregated £100,000,000. The private drawing-room cars of millionaires
are _too_ handsome; they do not indicate so much a necessity of taste
as a craving to spend. Many of the best hotels are characterised by a
tasteless magnificence which annoys rather than attracts the artistic
sense. At one hotel I stayed at in a fashionable watering-place the
cheapest bedroom cost £1 a night; but I did not find that its costly
tapestry hangings, huge Japanese vases, and elaborately carved
furniture helped me to woo sweet slumber any more successfully than
the simple equipments of an English village inn. Indeed, they rather
suggested insomnia, just as the ominous name of "Macbeth," affixed to
one of the bedrooms in the Shakespeare Hotel at Stratford-on-Avon,
immediately suggested the line "Macbeth doth murder sleep."

This materialistic tendency, however, which its defenders call a
higher standard of comfort, is not confined to the circles of the
millionaires; it crops out more or less at all the different levels.