"Changing--changing--changing.That is what it is always doing--America.We have not reached repose yet.One wonders how long it will be before we shall.Now we are always hurrying breathlessly after the next thing--the new one--which we always think will be the better one.Other countries built themselves slowly.In the days of their building, the pace of life was a march.When America was born, the march had already begun to hasten, and as a nation we began, in our first hour, at the quickening speed.Now the pace is a race.New York is a kaleidoscope.I myself can remember it a wholly different thing.One passes down a street one day, and the next there is a great gap where some building is being torn down--a few days later, a tall structure of some sort is touching the sky.It is wonderful, but it does not tend to calm the mind.That is why we cross the Atlantic so much.The sober, quiet-loving blood our forbears brought from older countries goes in search of rest.Mixed with other things, I feel in my own being a resentment against newness and disorder, and an insistence 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 enter into description of the life and movements of the place, without its curiously involving some connection with the huge wealth of it--with its influence, its rise, its swelling, or waning.
"Somehow one cannot free one's self from it.This is the age of wealth and invention--but of wealth before all else.
Sometimes one is tired--tired of it."
"You would not be tired of it if--well, if you were I, said Lady Anstruthers rather pathetically.
"Perhaps not," Betty answered."Perhaps not."She herself had seen people who were not tired of it in the sense in which she was--the men and women, with worn or intently anxious faces, hastening with the crowds upon the pavements, all hastening somewhere, in chase of that small portion of the wealth which they earned by their labour as their daily share; the same men and women surging towards elevated railroad stations, to seize on places in the homeward-bound trains; or standing in tired-looking groups, waiting for the approach of an already overfull street car, in which they must be packed together, and swing to the hanging straps, to keep upon their feet.Their way of being weary of it would be different from hers, they would be weary only of hearing of the mountains of it which rolled themselves up, as it seemed, in obedience to some irresistible, occult force.
On the day after Stornham village had learned that her ladyship and Miss Vanderpoel had actually gone to London, the dignified firm of Townlinson & Sheppard received a visit which created some slight sensation in their establishment, though it had not been entirely unexpected.It had, indeed, been heralded by a note from Miss Vanderpoel herself, who had asked that the appointment be made.Men of Messrs.Townlinson & Sheppard's indubitable rank in their profession could not fail to know the significance of the Vanderpoel name.
They knew and understood its weight perfectly well.When their client had married one of Reuben Vanderpoel's daughters, they had felt that extraordinary good fortune had befallen him and his estate.Their private opinion had been that Mr.
Vanderpoel's knowledge of his son-in-law must have been limited, or that he had curiously lax American views of paternal duty.The firm was highly reputable, long established strictly conservative, and somewhat insular in its point of view.It did not understand, or seek to understand, America.