The amount of
"rottenness" which they expect it to reveal is always enormous, and
they look forward to the exposure and the general coming-down of
their guilty neighbors to "the hard pan" with the keenest relish.
They have long, for instance, been unable to imagine where the
multitude of people who live in brown-stone houses get the money to
keep them. There was something wrong about it, they felt satisfied,
though they could not tell what, and when the panic comes they half
fancy that the murder will out, and that there will be a great
migration of fraudulent bankrupts from Fifth Avenue and its
neighborhood into tenement-houses on the East and North Rivers. How
Mrs. Smith, too, dressed as she did, and where Smith got the money
to take her to Sharon every summer, and how Jones managed to
entertain as he was doing, have often been puzzling problems, which
"the crash" in the money market is at last going to solve. It is
also highly gratifying to those who consider yachting a senseless
amusement to reflect that the panic will probably diminish the
number of yachts, and they even flatter themselves that it may stop
yachting in future, and reduce the general style of living among
rich young men.
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