In Oscar Wilde's text "The Model Millionaire," the charming and penniless Hughie Erskine is madly in love with Laura Merton, the daughter of a retired colonel who finds Hughie congenial but will not give Hughie permission to wed Laura until he has amassed a fortune of 10,000 pounds. So, on the one hand, a major theme of this short story is that money is essential to happiness—without it Hughie cannot marry his true love. Poor men cannot waste time and energy on romance; they should be focusing their energies on working their way out of poverty.

Yet as the story progresses, we find that Hughie eventually comes into a fortune of 10,000 pounds by being kindhearted and impractical, giving his last sovereign to a man he thinks is a poor artist's model. The artist's model turns out to be a wealthy baron who rewards Hughie with the 10,000 pounds he needs to marry Laura. Even in a thoroughly material world, Hughie's kindness is shown to have monetary value, completely contradicting the last part of the sentence referenced above: "Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic."