Every day in the year many a suddenly enriched family is busy about the same enterprise. Families from the less fashionable parts of the city moving to the fashionable parts. Families from other cities and towns--east, west, north, and south--advancing to social conquest under the leadership of mammas and daughters tired of shining in obscure, monotonous, and unappreciative places. There are I forget how many thousands of millionaires on Manhattan Island; enough, I know, with the near millionaires and those living like millionaires, to make a city of three or four hundred thousand, not including servants and parasites. Not all of these have the fashionable craze; at least, they haven’t it in its worst form--the form in which it possessed my wife. All the acute sufferers must find suitable lodgments near Fifth Avenue if not in it. Now New York is ever ready to receive and to “trim” the arriving millionaire. It has all kinds of houses and apartments to meet the peculiarities of his--or, rather, of his wife’s and daughter’s--notions of grandeur. It has a multitude of purveyors of furnishings and decorations likewise designed to catch crude and grandiose tastes. My wife was busy with these gentry. “Don’t you think we’d better go a little slow?” said I. “Why not live in a hotel on Manhattan and look about us?” I had respect for my wife’s capacity at the woman side of the game; she had thoroughly drilled me to more than generous appreciation of it. But at the same time I was not so blinded by her charm for me or so convinced by her insistent and plausible egotism that I had not noted certain minor failures of hers due to her ignorance of the art of spending money. She was clever at learning. But often her vanity lured her into fancying she knew, when in fact her education in that particular direction was all miseducation. She dressed much more giddily in our first years in Brooklyn than she did afterwards. And in the later years she made still further discoveries as to dress that resulted in another revolution, away from quietness, not toward the gaudy but toward smartness--that curious quality which makes a woman’s toilet conspicuous without the least suggestion of the loud. However, Edna scorned my suggestion that she make haste slowly. She had long been engaged in a thorough study of the mode of life in millionairedom. Newspapers, Sunday supplements, magazines, and society novels had helped her. She had examined the exteriors of the famous palaces. She had got into the drawing-rooms and ballrooms of two or three palaces by way of high-priced charity tickets. She had in one instance roamed into sitting rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms until caught and led back by some vigilant and unbribable servant. I wonder if she ever recalls that adventure now! Probably not. I think I have recorded her ability absolutely to forget whatever it pleases her not to remember. She had been educating herself, so when I suggested caution, she replied: