How a "Paying Guest" gets into Select Circles.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XL, Issue 7923, 4 October 1904, Page 3

How a "Paying Guest" gets into Select Circles.

Some of the shifts to which titled impecuniosity leads are disclosed in an amusing fashion by a wealthy American, a Wall-street financier, who went to London to buy his way as a " paying guest" into select circles for the Goodwood and Cowes festivities. He began his enterprise by a resort to the columns of the Morning Post. An expenditure cf 6/9 in an advertisement brought him 38 replies, quite half of them bearing the names and soronets of people who figure prominently in society. One letter displayed impressively in purple w&x the seal of a duchess, who as he puts it, was " ambitious to become my landlady." She asked the modest sum of 10 guineas a week. Another great ladj, accustomed to see her name in tbo " Court Ciroular," offered tointroduce him to the Prince of Monaco, at Ccwes, but was silent on the Bubjecti of terms. A third was willing to cake him up and introduce him during the first week to one peer, to one nephew of the peer, and to her sister-in-law and niece, both of them ladies of title, for the ridiculously low fee of 4 guinea* a week. Ultimately he contracted for a lump sum of £1000 to be taken in hand by a Dowager Countess of distinguished lineage. His first businesßtalk with her took place through an hotel telephone. " Americans," he remarks," have a way oforiticisingnon.hnstlling.unbusinegslike English ways, but they should just have some dealings with a few bill-burdened,' entail-ridden aristocrats looking for paying gnescs, and they would shed that idea as completely aa a.snake easts its (•kin. No Wall street man on the 'jump' could ha7o handled a "phone better than did the dowager, and the way she ' stuck' through the subsequent negotiations made me—the last of a long, illustrious line of 'hard drivers'—thank my stars and stripes I had no use to talk dollars to her every day. 1' She made him agree not to wear certain tight-fitting American clothes, expressed a wish that he would moderate his American accent, and gave him daily "finishing courses" at convenient opportunities. He found a good deal to admire in her, but displays a grudee against her son, a young Earl, who disliked the arrangement. But everybody does it; society recognises the paying guest, as it has recognised the paid chaperone, and nobody is particularly scandalised.