Mark Twain had accepted his father-in-law's challenge: he was not going to fall behind the pace set by a coal-merchant whose household expenses were $40,000 a year. No one ever delighted more than he now in living up to those principles of "the conspicuous consumption of goods," "predatory emulation" and "the pecuniary canons of taste" which, according to Mr. Veblen, actuate the propertied class. "A failure to increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at hand is felt in popular apprehension," says Mr. Veblen, "to call for explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those who fall short in this respect." Of course Mark Twain couldn't stand that! As early as 1875 he writes to Mr. Howells: "You see I take a vile, mercenary view of things--but then my household expenses are something almost ghastly": he estimated that in the year 1881 he had spent considerably more than $100,000. "It was with the increased scale of living," says Mr. Paine, "that Clemens had become especially eager for some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel Sellers, he must have something with 'millions in it.'" This was the visible sign that his mode of living had now become permanently extravagant. In 1906, long after his wife had died and when he was living much of the time virtually alone, his household expenses amounted, according to Mr. Paine, "to more than fifty dollars a day. In the matter of food, the choicest and most expensive the market could furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and highest-priced servants, ample as to number." Certainly his natural taste, which was always, we are told, for a simple, inexpensive style, would never have set that scale: it was a habit he had formed in those early efforts to qualify as an admired citizen. And so was his "disposition towards an expansive, all-round life," a disposition that finally made all concentration impossible to him. "In his large hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur," says Mr. Paine, "he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and delight of his guests. There were _always_ guests; they were coming and going constantly. Clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a 'bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of his company.... For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay the price of it, whether in money or in endurance"--after a while he virtually gave up all thought of writing except during the summer months: "I cannot write a book at home," he frankly told his mother--"and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed for the simpler life--above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit