Mencken's Rebuttal to Thorstein Veblen's Claim of Conspicuous Consumption

Thorstein Veblen famously defined conspicuous consumption as people buying, wearing, driving, and enjoying certain products and services less for their intrinsic value than for the status they signaled. H.L. Mencken, rebutting Veblen's claims that people bought pricier goods because of the status they conferred, wrote, in Prejudices, First Series (1919):

Do I enjoy a decent bath because I know that John Smith cannot afford one - or because I delight in being clean?
Do I admire Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony because it is incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists - or because I genuinely love music?
Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland to fried liver because plow-hands must put up with the liver - or because the terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dose?
Do I prefer kissing a pretty girl to kissing a charwoman, because even a janitor may kiss a charwoman - or because the pretty girl looks better, smells better, and kisses better?

It might be that the pricier goods communicate social status. It might also be that they're pricier simply because they're more pleasing.