"We won't discuss such possibilities," I said firmly. "It is unnecessary to do so. My _Lives of Great Men_ is nearly finished. It is the sort of book that every home will be obliged to store. There are seventy million people in the United States. Let us put down seven million homes, at a low estimate, and there you are with seven million books yielding us a royalty--not including the sales in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. The prospect is really alluring." "So it is, Archie," she assented jubilantly, "and here we are, discussing saving, like Sarah Jane and her young man. It is very narrow of us. I forgot your book. And yet literature is most profitable, and such a necessity! The other day, down-town, I saw the complete works of Shakespeare--plays and poems--bound in leather for fifty cents." "My book will cost five dollars," I said rather hesitantly. "Well, dear, it's so much _newer_ than Shakespeare," she asserted triumphantly. "I don't suppose that it will last quite as long--I could not say that, Archie--but while it is selling, it may as well sell for five dollars. Nobody ever thinks of competing with Shakespeare. I'm very proud of your _Lives of Great Men_ though you have never read any of it to me." "Perhaps that's why," I suggested, temporarily moody, as most genius is said to be. "You're a silly boy, and I'm not going to flatter you by telling you how much more interested I am in Archibald Fairfax than in William Shakespeare. You shall read me your _Lives of Great Men_ as soon as we have our cook. In the meantime, I'm so glad you have decided not to save. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die. It is hard to do those three things, at a seventy-five-cent _table-d'hôte_." "And the 'to-morrow we die' doesn't seem so hard?" "No, it doesn't, really, Archie. The way we are living now is enough to drive anybody to pessimism. It is unnatural; it is wrong; we will spend our money, and be happy." There is one certain thing about New York. You can get anything you want in that "tuberosity of civilized life" if you have the wherewithal, or, in other words, "the price." It is what Europeans call the middle classes that suffer the most in the American metropolis, whereas in other capitals, it is they that are the happiest. The extremely indigent and the inflatedly wealthy never complain of New York City. It is the neither-rich-nor-poor who find life difficult and are unable to gratify the innate need for refinement and comfort; who discover that graceful life is a knotty problem, and that the art of "keeping up appearances" with moderate means is well-nigh impossible. New York is the Mecca of the rich and the poor; it is the Hades of the unhappy medium. Those who are just "comfortable" in London, are "just uncomfortable" in New York.