The Champagne Standard - John Mrs. Lane

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and great are always called functions. There were so many billionaires present that a modest millionaire was quite out of it. Everything was of the costliest, the lighting was entirely by radium, and the music provided was of an expense supremely worthy of even the consideration of billionaires. The very greatest violinist had been induced, by the offer of a small fortune, to play, and indeed, while he played, the host and another billionaire intimate amused themselves calculating the money value of each tone at the rate the great artist demanded for playing. Just as they finished, and he finished, and a languid murmur signified the approval of the glittering audience, the young daughter of the billionaire host, who had, apparently, not received the last polish in the school of unutterable wealth, put an entreating hand on her father's arm:

      "Do please introduce me," and she mentioned a very famous name, "he does play so divinely."

      "My child," and the magnate, who had started life peddling tripe, spoke with haughty disfavour and drew his eyebrows together in a frown, "we pay such people, but we don't know them."

      O Champagne Standard!

       Table of Contents

      The clever woman who wrote American Wives and English Husbands, put her Californian heroine in a position in which the one problem she was not required to solve was English housekeeping. She might break her heart over her English husband, but the author does not add to our pangs by relating how her American bride, having first studied the peculiarities of her Englishman, next varied her soul's trials by "wrestling" with the lower but equally irritating problems prepared for her by the English tradesmen. Under which general term are included all the male and female creatures who, having helped to set up a brand-new household, immediately proceed to hinder it from running.

      The problem of English husbands I leave to more gifted pens, but I may perhaps be permitted to tell what the American woman experiences, who, having "pulled up stakes," plants herself on English soil. This era of international marriages is not at all confined to the daughters of American millionaires who can afford the luxury of English dukes. Nor, in giving my experiences, do I address the prospective Anglo-American duchess, who would not be likely to spend several sleepless nights, trying to decide whether she should or should not take her carpets or the "ice-chest." However, it is well to give one little word of advice to the American girl proposing to turn herself into an Englishwoman; and that is, she must be very sure of her Englishman, because for him she gives up friends and country, and he has to be that and more to her.

      America has a bad reputation for being a very expensive place in which to live. The large earnings are offset, it is said, by expenses out of proportion to the wages. Both facts are exaggerated; and, in contrasting English and American housekeeping, one of the first reasons, I have decided, why English living flies away with money is that the currency itself tends to expense.

      To start with, the English unit of money value is a penny—the American a cent, but observe that a penny is two cents in value. I am asked eightpence for a pound of tomatoes; I think "how cheap" until I make a mental calculation, "sixteen cents, that's dear." It is the guileless penny which, like the common soldier, does the mighty executions and swells the bill. One looks on the penny as a cent, and that is the keynote of the expense of living in London.

      To go farther into the coinage: there is the miserable half-crown—it is more than half-a-dollar, and yet it only represents a half-dollar in importance. "What shall I give him?" I ask piteously of my Englishman when a fee is in question. "Oh, half-a-crown," is his reply. I obey, and mourn over twelve-and-a-half cents thrown away with no credit to myself.

      Poor English people who have no dollar! Don't talk of four shillings! Four shillings are a shabby excuse for two self-righteous half-crowns. Oh, for a good simple dollar! Five dollars make a sovereign, roughly speaking—that wretched and delusive coin which is no sooner changed into shillings and half-crowns than it disappears like chaff before the wind. Now good dollars would repose in one's purse, either in silver or greenbacks (very dirty, but never mind!), and demand reflection before spending.

      Think of the importance of a man's salary multiplied by dollars! The wealth of France is undoubtedly due to her coinage—francs are the money of a thrifty middle-class—the English coinage is intended for peers of the realm and paupers. A hundred pounds a year is not a vast income, but how much better it sounds in dollars—five hundred dollars; if, however, you multiply it by francs, twenty-five hundred francs, why it sounds noble! Count an Englishman's income by hundreds, and it does seem shabby! Dollars, when you have four thousand to spend, represent a value quite out of proportion to the eight hundred pounds they really are.

      Change your English coinage—don't have half-crowns or sovereigns, but nice simple dollars (call them by any other name if you are too proud to adopt dollars), and see the new prosperity that will dawn on the middle-classes. A little tradesman struggling along on one hundred and fifty pounds a year will feel like a capitalist on seven hundred and fifty dollars. This is not straying from the subject, for it was my first observation in English economics.

      On the other hand, the days have passed in America for the making of sudden and great fortunes, nor are the streets paved with gold. The lady from County Cork does not step straight from the steerage into a Fifth Avenue drawing-room (unless by way of the kitchen), but there's work, and there are good wages; and if the lady from County Cork and her brothers and cousins would work as hard in Ireland as they do in the United States, that perplexing island would bloom like a rose. That their fences are always tumbling down, even over there, and their broken windows stuffed with rags, is only an amiable national trait to which the Irish are loyal even in America, just to remind them of home.

      "Everything is cheaper in England," they all said when the decisive step whether to take or leave the contents of our large house had to be taken. "It won't be worth packing, taking, and storing. Send everything to auction."

      That was the advice. I compromised, and one day half of the dear familiar household gods were trundled off to be sold—alas! and the elect were left to be packed. Every American house has a grass-grown, fenced-in space at the back of the house called a yard, for the drying and bleaching of the laundry. Ours was invaded by three decent men and piles of pine boards, and then the making of cases and the packing began.

      The packing was contracted for. The chief of the firm came, looked through each room, estimated, and gave us the price of the whole work completed and placed on the freight steamer. One is told that the English are the best packers in the world, but I have had more damage done in two cases sent from Bristol to London than in eighty cases sent from Boston to Liverpool. The three men worked three weeks, and then took all the cases out of the house and put them on the freight steamer, and the price of all this wonderful packing was about forty pounds. What will surprise an English person is that not one of these men expected a fee. My one ceaseless regret is that I did not take everything, from the kitchen poker to the mouse-trap.

      On the arrival of our eighty cases in London, they were received by the warehouse people, who sheltered them until the brand-new English house was ready, which was not for a year. The packing, sending, and storing of all this furniture was under one hundred pounds, which, with my English experience, I knew would have bought nothing. I did question the wisdom of bringing carpets, and I do not think it pays unless they are very good and large—the remaking and cleaning cost too much to waste on anything not very good. Having my furniture safely landed, the next step was to get a house.

      One finds that the moderate rents asked for English houses is misleading, for in addition the tenant is expected to pay the rates and taxes, which add to the original rent one-third more, only somehow this fact is ignored. Get a house for one hundred and fifty pounds, and you can add fifty pounds to that by way of rates and taxes. Nor does that enable you to get anything very gorgeous in the shape of a house, but one obtainable for about the same price in New York or Boston, minus those comforts which Americans have come to consider as a matter of course, until they learn better in England. Only in flats are the rates

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