Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill Homeburg's Two Four - Hundredths The Struggles of our Best Families to Impress Us HOLD on, Jim. Don't hurry so. Remember I don't have a chance to walk up Fifth Avenue every day. Give me a chance to astonish myself. Here are ten thousand women going by in clothes that would make a lily turn red and burn up with shame, and an equal number of proud gents with curlycue collars on their overcoats, and I want to do the sight justice. You see all this parade every day, but I don't, and I want to drink it all in. See that feminine explosion in salmon plush!That would paralyze business back home. Watch that hat crossing the street — it ought to be arrested for being without visible means of support— Oh, I see! There's a girl under it with one of those rifle-barrel skirts. Gee! Ssh, Jim! Did you see the lady who just passed? Let's beg her pardon for intruding on this earth. Say, you could peel enough haughtiness off of her to supply eight duchesses and still have enough for the lady cashier at my hotel. I'll bet she is one of your Four Hundred. For goodness' sake, Jim, if we pass any of your social lighthouses, point them out to me. I'm here to see the sights. I know the rest of the country throws it up to New York a lot because of its Four Hundred, and that the ordinary smalltown man gets so scornful when he talks of the idle and diamond-crusted rich, with their poodle-dog pastimes, that he lives in constant danger of stabbing his eyes with his nose. But I'm not that way; I'minterested. Nothing fascinates me so much as the stories in your papers about Mrs. Clymorr Busst's clever pearl earrings, made to resemble door knobs; and about Mrs. Spenser Coyne's determination to have Columbia University removed because it interferes with the view from her garage; and about little Mr...