Dear me! how expensive it is to be poor. Every time I go out, my best bib and tucker has to go on. If Zebedee was worth a cool million, I might wear a coal-hod on my head, if I chose, with perfect impunity. There was that old nabob's wife at lecture, the other night, in a dress that might have been made for Noah's great-grandmother. She can afford it! Now if it rains knives and forks, I must sport a ten dollar hat, a forty dollar dress, and a hundred dollar shawl. If I go to a concert, I must take the highest priced seat, and ride there and back, just to let 'Tom, Dick and Harry' see that I can afford it. Then we must hire the most expensive pew in the broad-aisle of a tip-top church, and give orders to the sexton not to admit any strangers into it who look snobbish. Then my little children, Napoleon Bonaparte and Dona Maria Smith, can't go to a public school, because, you know, we shouldn't have to pay anything.
"Then if I go shopping, to buy a paper of needles, I have to get a little chap to bring them home, because it wouldn't answer for me to be seen carrying a bundle through the streets. We have to keep three servants where one might do; and Zebedee's coats have to be sent to the tailor when they need a button sewed on, for the look of the thing.
"Then if I go to the sea-shore, in summer, I can't take my comfort, as rich people do, in gingham dresses, loose shoes, and cambric sun-bonnets. My senses! no! I have to be screwed up by ten o'clock in a Swiss muslin dress, a French cap, and the contents of an entire jeweller's shop showered over my person; and my Napoleon Bonaparte and Dona Maria can't go off the piazza, because the big rocks and little pebbles cut their toes so badly through their patent kid slippers.
"Then if Zebedee goes a-fishing, he wouldn't dare to put on a linen coat for the price of his reputation. No indeed! Why, he never goes to the barn-yard without drawing on his white kids. Then he orders the most ruinous wines at dinner, and fees those white jackets, till his purse is as empty as an egg-shell. I declare it is abominably expensive. I don't believe rich people have the least idea how much it costs poor people to live!"
