Time & Perspective Quote by William Allen Butler

Money talks, and in Butler's hands it also whines. The speaker reports a woman lamenting she has "not a thing...to wear" while wrapped in a $500 dress and jewelry "worth ten times more". The joke isn't just that she's rich; it's that wealth has acquired its own vocabulary of deprivation. Butler targets a peculiarly modern illusion: abundance so total it produces a new kind of scarcity, where "nothing" means nothing suitable for the occasion, the audience, the self she needs to project in that hour.

The intent is satirical, but it's not only a cheap dunk on vanity. The lines mimic the cadence of overheard drawing-room gossip, with the speaker's fussy accounting ("and not a cent less") doing a second job: it exposes the masculine impulse to convert feeling into figures, as if price tags could settle the argument. That tiny detail sharpens the social diagnosis. In this world, both parties are trapped in the same economy of display. She measures identity through novelty; he measures her credibility through cost. Each treats the wardrobe as a ledger.

The subtext is class performance as emotional reality. "Wide world" widens the absurdity: her complaint is cosmically phrased because status anxiety is experienced as existential, not petty. Written in the 19th century, it lands at a moment when consumer culture, department stores, and etiquette were professionalizing taste. Butler understands that conspicuous consumption doesn't end desire; it industrializes it, turning plenty into a treadmill and calling the exhaustion "nothing to wear."