Explore "The Sowers" by Henry Seton Merriman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In these democratic days a very democratic theory has exploded. Not so very long ago we believed, or made semblance of belief, that it is useless to put a high price upon a ticket with the object of securing that selectness for which the highborn crave. "If they want to come," Lady Champignon (wife of Alderman Champignon) would say, "they do not mind paying the extra half-guinea."
But Lady Champignon was wrong. It is not that the self-made man cannot or will not pay two guineas for a ball-ticket. It is merely that, in his commercial way, he thinks that he will not have his money's worth, and therefore prefers keeping his two guineas to spend on something more tangible -- say food. The nouveau riche never quite purges his mind of the instinct commercial, and it therefore goes against the grain to pay heavily for a form of entertainment which his soul had not the opportunity of learning to love in its youth. The aristocrat, on the other hand, has usually been brought up to the cultivation of enjoyment, and he therefore spends with perfect equanimity more on his pleasure than the bourgeois mind can countenance.