for
three-quarters of a million, and spent as much in restoring it, and
filled it with servants dressed in fourteenth-century costumes. Here
was a five-million-dollar art collection hidden away where nobody ever
saw it!

One saw the meaning of this madness most clearly in the young men of
Society. Some were killing themselves and other people in automobile
races at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Some went in for
auto-boats, mere shells of things, shaped like a knife-blade, that tore
through the water at forty miles an hour. Some would hire professional
pugilists to knock them out; others would get up dog-fights and
bear-fights, and boxing matches with kangaroos. Montague was taken to
the home of one young man who had given his life to hunting wild game
in every corner of the globe, and would travel round the world for a
new species to add to his museum of trophies. He had heard that Baron
Rothschild had offered a thousand pounds for a "bongo," a huge
grass-eating animal, which no white man had ever seen; and he had taken
a year's trip into the interior, with a train of a hundred and thirty
natives, and had brought out the heads of forty different species,
including a bongo--which the Baron did not get! He met another who had
helped to organize a balloon club, and two twenty-four-hour trips in
the clouds. (This, by the way, was the latest sport--at Tuxedo they had
races between balloons and automobiles; and Montague met one young lady
who boasted that she had been up five times.) There was another young
millionaire who sat and patiently taught Sunday School, in the presence
of a host of reporters; there was another who set up a chain of
newspapers all over the country and made war upon his class. There were
others who went in for settlement work and Russian
revolutionists--there were even some who called themselves Socialists!
Montague thought that this was the strangest fad of all; and when he
met one of these young men at an afternoon tea, he gazed at him with
wonder and perplexity--thinking of the man he had heard ranting on the
street-corner.

This was the "second generation." Appalling as it was to think of,
there was a third growing up, and getting ready to take the stage. And
with wealth accumulating faster than ever, who could guess what they
might do? There were still in Society a few men and women who had
earned their money, and had some idea of the toil and suffering that it
stood for; but when the thi