ARGENTINE WEALTH

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 January 1926, Page 2

ARGENTINE WEALTH

“LID OFF LIFE” Just now life in Buenos Ayres, capital of the Argentine, city of mil- . lionaires, is a dream of riches, luxury, and beauty under subtropical skies. It is efl fete partly owing to the visit of the PrilfijG of Wales, but mainly because this is the first week of the social season in the wealthiest and most magnificent of all the South American cities. All the estancieros, the great landed proprietors, lords of boundless wheat lands afid countless head of cattle, are “in toW— saving the little crowd who are living In the high life in Paris and Deauville; and their palaces are agleam with lights at night and murmurous with the gay laughter of women and the' languorous music of guitar and mandolin. The few millionaires who do not possess town houses arrive like emperors and expect to be treated as such. The hoteliers comply and charge accordingly. One hundred pounds a day for a huge suite with silver baths my lord of the pampas may have to pay for his accommodation. With an income of two or three hundred thousand pounds a year, he does not worry. The enchanted city, with its sweeping tree-fringed boulevards and great monde. The life of the city is not that of the millionaire social set. Your estanciero likes to adorn his entertaining with an ornate dignity and ceremony. He will beg you to dine with him as if it were a delightful condescension on your part to accept. As his guest of honour you will eat off gold plate at a great table smothered with brilliant flowers, and agleam with cut glass, silver, and porcelain. His womenfolk—not always pretty, but slim, lithe, supple, wonderfully' smart, dressed in the latest whims of the Paris modistes—will entertain you with music; and finally your host will turn out his elegant carriage drawn by a team of thoroughbreds, worth maybe five thousand pounds, or a big gleaming white car with silver fittings, and escort you back to your hotel. Everything among the estancieros is like that—in the grand manner. And -.rai- iVinca nnf nf his easte eomnlain

yet those not of his caste complain of his arrogance and ostentation. And when you escape from his seductive charm you can see, often enough, peeping out here and there under the lacquered veneer of manner, the betraying mark of the new-rich pride and taste. The truth is, that though your Argentine millionaire prides himself on his descent from the Spanish conqueror, in seven cases out of ten he is of mixed breed, and in nine cases out of ten he has no tradition of riches and spacious living. His great-grandfather rode out in his poncho cloak, silver spurred, large-hatted, cigar between teeth, and superintended the gauchos tending his half-wild herds. He carried his day’s provisions with him —fat cow’s ribs tucked under the packings of his high-peaked, silver-incrusted saddle. And he lived a rude but full-blooded and masterful life in a big, plain, rough’country house. Then came the railways to open up the barren pampas and turn them in thirty years into the richest cornlands on earth, and the refrigerator plant to bring in the era of frozen meat. And on the wave of the tre-

mendous new trade in meat and grain the rude, forceful estancieros soared up into the dizzy realms of millionairedom. Down came the rude family estancias. Great mansions arose in their place and were filled with treasures from Europe. Spacious parks were planted about the new palaces. And the new lords of the pampas no longei’ j-ode out, silver-spurred and largehatted, with their rations of cows’ ribs, to oversee the gauchos. They took to sending their children to be finished off in Paris and American colleges, and to coming over to European playgrounds to fling away some of the millions accumulated in their coffers. Men whom the old regime used to despise for their upstart spirit, their crude pushfulness and shameless pursuit of trade, have bought the grandees’ lands fox* a song and married sons to their daughters and daughters to their heirs. . . And the young generation is beginning to kick up its heels and take the lid off life. No social season passes now with-

out a number of marriages being rushed through in a hurry. Though the girls who have gone abroad to finishing schools jazz, shingle, smoke, and wear last-word frocks, they don’t venture to go out to a private party without a chaperon—and yet these things will happen. The old-fashioned put it down to the new country clubs, on the American pattern, which have sprung up. Girls and young men go there in their high-powered cars for golf, tennis, tea dancing; and who knows what may happen? But after marriage all is well. The man is very much the master. He does not allow his wife to go out alone. She must even wait for her visit to dressmaker, costetiere, hairdresser, until he can accompany her. No gadding about is tolerated. And the Argentine fashionable does not worry much. To laugh, sing, nibble chocolates, dance and own plenty of jewels and frocks and a jealous husband—that is her idea of the ideal life.