Vanity Fair

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 73, Issue 371, 15 September 1930, Page 2

Vanity Fair

Tucked away behind a screen of lame and commonplace respectability, there’s a deal of the adventurer in most of us; that is why people spend unquestionably solid sums hunting after pirate gold which may or may not be buried on Cocos Island, why somebody is always ready to put down a hundred pounds for the release of the Spanish prisoner who knows where the emerald girdle of the Inca’s daughter is hidden, and why one or two quite comfortable little fortunes have been spent on the effort to extract gold from sea-water. Margot often things, when reading little cabled extracts about the Wobblings of Wall Street, that the days of fairy gold aren't past, after all. They are merely camouflaged. Cood business men know that the way to mal(e money is to gather together a I'ttle golden nest-egg, and then to arrange for some solid, satisfactory financial fowl to sit on it, and hatch out dividends al 5 per cent. But your picturesque financier —the one who makes a million or else ends on the thin bread-and-butter line—has an acid contempt for fowls; he goes into the strange places of the World, and demands that rocs and phoenizes and eagles shall be foster-mothers to his nest-egg. Most unreliable birds they are, but occasionally their whimsies are kind. “This odd little man," think they, “expects me to sit down and make a fortune for him. IVhat a jol(e. Tie almost deserves a trifle, for his impudence. I think 7TI let him have a million or two, and watch the fun." There be two kinds of seekers after gain, and one, in his visions, sees slacks and stacks of bank-

notes. The second doesn't; he would despise such a plain, miserly little vision. He sees diamonds as large as eggs which any pigeon might be proud to hatch, and dazzling white palaces, fringed with palms, and magic carpets, and rare bits of china. He sees himself, a second Haroun al Raschid, "wandering through the dusk-veiled streets of cities and graciously tipping hungry-lool(ing waiters with £lOO notes. One type is coldly temperate, both in getting Wealth and in keeping it. The other hankers foi the intoxication of being able to scatter pearls and sapphires. If his fortune doesn't come in a goldc.i rain, it needn’t, so far as he is concerned, come al all.

“ Chronicle ” Office W anganui, September 15, 1930

And all this moralising comes merely because Margot is trying io justify her own conduct in having bought still another Art Union ticket. “I might make £3000,” said she to a friend, optimistically. ‘You might save £30,” said the friend coldly. Margot has a feeling that the latter point of view is unimpeachably correct. Still, it’s not very excilin g, is it? Defiantly, MARGOT.