"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.
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