istence on the atmosphere of
long-established things."

But for years Lady Anstruthers had been living in the atmosphere of
long-established things, and felt no insistence upon it. She yearned to
hear of the great, changing Western world--of the great, changing city.
Betty must tell her what the changes were. What were the differences
in the streets--where had the new buildings been placed? How had Fifth
Avenue and Madison Avenue and Broadway altered? Were not Gramercy
Park and Madison Square still green with grass and trees? Was it all
different? Would she not know the old places herself? Though it seemed a
lifetime since she had seen them, the years which had passed were really
not so many.

It was good for her to talk and be talked to in this manner Betty saw.
Still handling her subject lightly, she presented picture after picture.
Some of them were of the wonderful, feverish city itself--the place
quite passionately loved by some, as passionately disliked by others.
She herself had fallen into the habit, as she left childhood behind her,
of looking at it with interested wonder--at its riot of life and power,
of huge schemes, and almost superhuman labours, of fortunes so colossal
that they seemed monstrosities in their relation to the world. People
who in Rosalie's girlhood had lived in big ugly brownstone fronts, had
built for themselves or for their children, houses such as, in other
countries, would have belonged to nobles and princes, spending fortunes
upon their building, filling them with treasures brought from foreign
lands, from palaces, from art galleries, from collectors. Sometimes
strange people built such houses and lived strange lavish, ostentatious
lives in them, forming an overstrained, abnormal, pleasure-chasing world
of their own. The passing of even ten years in New York counted itself
almost as a generation; the fashions, customs, belongings of twenty
years ago wore an air of almost picturesque antiquity.

"It does not take long to make an 'old New Yorker,'" she said. "Each
day brings so many new ones."

There were, indeed, many new ones, Lady Anstruthers found. People who
had been poor had become hugely rich, a few who had been rich had
become poor, possessions which had been large had swelled to unnatural
proportions. Out of the West had risen fortunes more monstrous than all
others. As she told one story after another, Bettina realised, as she
had done often before, that it was impossible to