“Have you counted the cost of all these things, Charles?” said his old uncle, as he entered the house one morning, and beheld the disarray consequent upon a large party the previous night.
“Yes, uncle, I think I have,” said Charles, smiling, as he sipped his coffee, at the old man’s simplicity. “The fellows who manage these affairs soon compel us to count the cost, for when I came down this morning, I found on the breakfast table this bill for nine hundred and fifty-four dollars.”
“Nine hundred dollars, Charles! You don’t mean to say that your party last night cost that sum?”
“I do, my dear sir, and considering that the bill includes every thing but the wines, I do not consider it an exorbitant one; however, the elegant colored gentleman who takes all this trouble for me does not charge me quite so much as he would if I employed him less frequently.”
The old man looked round and sighed. The apartments were in sad disorder, for the servants, overcome by the fatigues of the previous day, had followed the example of their master, and stolen from the morning the sleep they had been denied at night. A bottle lay shivered in one corner of the supper room, the champaigne with which it had been filled soaking into the rich carpet—a piece of plum-cake had been crushed by some heedless foot into the snow-white rug which lay before the drawing-room fire—the sweeping draperies of one of the curtains was still dripping with something which bore a marvellous resemblance to melted ice cream, and the whole suite of apartments wore that air of desolation which usually characterizes a “banquet hall deserted.”
“Do you calculate the destruction of furniture in counting the cost of your parties, Charles?” asked Mr. Waterton.
“Oh no—that of course is expected; furniture, you know, becomes old-fashioned and requires to be renewed about every three years, and therefore one may as well have the use of it while it is new.”
“You must have a vast addition to your fortune if you expect to pay for all these things.”
“My dear sir,” replied the nephew, with a most benignant smile at his uncle’s superlative ignorance of his affairs, “my dear sir, you do not seem to know that, in the course of about three years, I shall be one of the richest men in New York.”