You will be curious to know something concerning the
cost of living in such a house, and you may be sure
that I did not fail to question Mrs. Makely on this
point. She was at once very volubly communicative;
she told me all she knew, and, as her husband said,
a great deal more.
“Why, of course,” she began, “you
can spend all you have in New York, if you like, and
people do spend fortunes every year. But I suppose
you mean the average cost of living in a brown-stone
house, in a good block, that rents for $1800 or $2000
a year, with a family of three or four children, and
two servants. Well, what should you say, Dick?”
“Ten or twelve thousand a year—fifteen,”
answered her husband.
“Yes, fully that,” she answered, with
an effect of disappointment in his figures. “We
had just ourselves, and we never spent less than seven,
and we didn’t dress, and we didn’t entertain,
either, to speak of. But you have to live on
a certain scale, and generally you live up to your
income.”
“Quite,” said Mr. Makely.
“I don’t know what makes it cost so.
Provisions are cheap enough, and they say people live
in as good style for a third less in London. There
used to be a superstition that you could live for less
in a flat, and they always talk to you about the cost
of a furnace, and a man to tend it and keep the snow
shovelled off your sidewalk, but that is all stuff.
Five hundred dollars will make up the whole difference,
and more. You pay quite as much rent for a decent
flat, and then you don’t get half the room.
No, if it wasn’t for the stairs, I wouldn’t
live in a flat for an instant. But that makes
all the difference.”
“And the young people,” I urged—“those
who are just starting in life—how do they
manage? Say when the husband has $1500 or $2000
a year?”
“Poor things!” she returned. “I
don’t know how they manage. They board
till they go distracted, or they dry up and blow away;
or else the wife has a little money, too, and they
take a small flat and ruin themselves. Of course,
they want to live nicely and like other people.”
“But if they didn’t?”
“Why, then they could live delightfully.
My husband says he often wishes he was a master-mechanic
in New York, with a thousand a year, and a flat for
twelve dollars a month; he would have the best time
in the world.”
Her husband nodded his acquiescence. “Fighting-cock
wouldn’t be in it,” he said. “Trouble
is, we all want to do the swell thing.”
“But you can’t all do it,” I ventured,
“and, from what I see of the simple, out-of-the-way
neighborhoods in my walks, you don’t all try.”
“Why, no,” he said. “Some of
us were talking about that the other night at the
club, and one of the fellows was saying that he believed
there was as much old-fashioned, quiet, almost countrified
life in New York, among the great mass of the people,
as you’d find in any city in the world.
Said you met old codgers that took care of their own
furnaces, just as you would in a town of five thousand
inhabitants.”
