Points of Friction
American reader what the two thousand black slaves with jars of jewels upon their heads were to Dick Swiveller,—a vision of tasteful opulence. More intimate journalists tell us that a "Financial Potentate" eats baked potatoes for his luncheon, and gives his friends notebooks with a moral axiom on each page. We cannot really care what this unknown gentleman eats. We cannot, under any conceivable circumstance, covet a moral notebook. Yet such items of information would not be painstakingly acquired unless they afforded some mysterious gratification to their readers.
As for the "athletic millionaires," who sport in the open like—and often with—ordinary men, they keep their chroniclers nimble. Fashions in plutocracy change with the changing times. The reporter who used to be turned loose in a nabob's private office, and who rapturously described its "ebony centre-table on which is laid a costly
236
