Explore "25" by Beverley Nichols on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I noticed more and more in America that vulgarity (which one finds, of course, all over the world, even in the South Sea Islands), seemed to be in inverse ratio to wealth. The people who were really tiresome, who talked about their automobiles and their incomes, and their emeralds, and their trips to Europe, were nearly always the people with comparatively small incomes. They might be rich, but they weren't ‘rolling,' like the Goulds or the Vanderbilts.
For example, a perfectly appalling little woman to whose box at the opera I was once unwillingly lured, suddenly, during an _entr'acte_, produced from her stocking a cheque for a hundred thousand dollars, and waved it in my face, saying, ‘Say, what d'you think of that for a birthday present? ' A most unsavoury proceeding, and as I afterwards discovered, a complete fake. The woman's husband had not a hundred thousand dollars in the world, and went bankrupt only a few weeks later.