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.
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