Explore "The King Diamond" by Fred M. White on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
As a matter of hard, prosaic fact, the woman known as Cleopatra was not so inordinately rich as the popular journals would have their readers believe. It was true that she made an almost princely income, but, on the other hand, she was more than recklessly extravagant, and, like most of her class, exceedingly generous and open-handed. With her it was emphatically a case of easy come, easy go, so that there were times when she was more or less short of ready money.
It might be urged that she was obtaining ready money every week-end; this, indeed, was true. But then Cleopatra was as ambitious as she was unscrupulous, and looked forward to the time when she would have a fine place of her own in the country, where she could entertain her friends with that lavish display and splendour which were in accord with the best traditions of Hollywood. She wanted a mansion, some fine old castellated place, with a long history behind it, plus a yacht and a villa on the Riviera, to say nothing of a grouse moor in Scotland. And all this she might have attained but for the really criminal way in which she threw her money about.