Presently we find them installed in a “small” house or “little” apartment--the rent is more than ten thousand a year, and they have twelve servants. His skill as a money-maker is talked about; her dresses are admired and envied; their equipages, their surroundings, their dinners are models of luxurious good taste. As both are shrewd managers, their forty thousand a year enables them to seem to be spending twice that amount. They are in the high-road of plutocratic happiness and are creditably charioted. And as the years pass, their increasing wealth rolls up on itself as large wealth has a habit of doing. They annually tour the multi-millionaire circuit in great state--North Carolina, Hempstead, the Hudson, London, Paris, Newport. They have children. No healthier, rosier, more intelligent children can be found anywhere than theirs. They have the best care that competent nurses and governesses can give. They live by the clock, are fed the most expensive and at the same time the most sensible food. They are dressed in a manner that makes plain mothers blink and stare. There are only two of them and the elder is only seven, but their clothing bill last year was fourteen hundred. It will be less, much less, as they grow older, for it is not good form to dress boys and girls extravagantly--at least not yet. They speak French and German as fluently as they speak English, and far more correctly. They have everything for mind and body--except the direct constant care of their mother. They have everything--that money can buy. Let us go back to the cross-roads and take a candidate for success who, when he achieved his modest five thousand a year, married and went to live in a flat or small suite in an apartment hotel of the kind that would have been called luxurious a dozen years ago, but is now third-class. Let us assume that his wife, whether she came from out-of-town or from the city, is the typical present-day big-city woman of extravagant ideas--is, like her husband, wealth-crazy and luxury-crazy and society-mad. In all probability they will have no children. Children are not popular among the extravagant in New York--dogs are less expensive, less troublesome, fully as affectionate and far less unfashionable. The extravagant rich still tolerate children, possibly because of a quaint, made-in-England theory that aristocratic families should maintain the “family line.” But “climbers” cannot afford the necessary time and money. It was Swift--was it not?--who first called attention to the fact that the attitude in climbing and in crawling is the same.