“Well—­to me, for example—­she is acceptable as children are acceptable—­a blessed, sweet, clean relief from the women of the Fanes’ set, for example?”

“Like Rosamund?”

“Yes.  And, Ninette, you and Austin seem to be drifting out of the old circles—­the sort that you and I were accustomed to.  You don’t mind my saying it, do you?—­but there were so many people in this town who had something besides millions—­amusing, well-bred, jolly people who had no end of good times, but who didn’t gamble and guzzle and stuff themselves and their friends—­who were not eternally hanging around other people’s wives.  Where are they, dear?”

“If you are indicting all of my friends, Phil—­”

“I don’t mean all of your friends—­only a small proportion—­which, however, connects your circle with that deadly, idle, brainless bunch—­the insolent chatterers at the opera, the gorged dowagers, the worn-out, passionless men, the enervated matrons of the summer capital, the chlorotic squatters on huge yachts, the speed-mad fugitives from the furies of ennui, the neurotic victims of mental cirrhosis, the jewelled animals whose moral code is the code of the barnyard—!”

“Philip!”

“Oh, I don’t mean that they are any more vicious than the idle and mentally incompetent in any walk of life.  East Side, West Side, Harlem, Hell’s Kitchen, Fifth Avenue, Avenue A, and Abingdon Square—­the denizens are only locally different, not specifically—­the species remains unchanged.  But everywhere, in every quarter and class and set and circle there is always the depraved; and the logical links that connect them are unbroken from Fifth Avenue to Chinatown, from the half-crazed extravagances of the Orchils’ Louis XIV ball to a New Year’s reception at the Haymarket where Troy Lil’s diamonds outshine the phony pearls of Hoboken Fanny, and Hatpin Molly leads the spiel with Clarence the Pig.”

“Phil, you are too disgusting!”

“I’m sorry—­it isn’t very nice of me, I suppose.  But, dear, I’m dead tired of moral squalor.  I do like the brightness of things, too, but I don’t care for the phosphorescence of social decay.”

“What in the world is the matter?” she exclaimed in dismay.  “You are talking like the wildest socialist.”

He laughed.  “We have become a nation of what you call ’socialists’—­though there are other names for us which mean more.  I am not discontented, if that is what you mean; I am only impatient; and there is a difference. . . .  And you have just asked me whether a young girl is interesting to me.  I answer, yes, thank God!—­for the cleaner, saner, happier hours I have spent this winter among my own kind have been spent where the younger set dominated.

“They are good for us, Nina; they are the hope of our own kind—­well-taught, well-drilled, wholesome even when negative in mind; and they come into our world so diffident yet so charmingly eager, so finished yet so unspoiled, that—­how can they fail to touch a man and key him to his best?  How can they fail to arouse in us the best of sympathy, of chivalry, of anxious solicitude lest they become some day as we are and stare at life out of the faded eyes of knowledge!”