them; and my aunt is there, very
marvelously wrapped about in a dust cloak and a cage-like veil, and
there are hotel porters and under-porters very alert, and an obsequious
manager; and the tall young lady in black from the office is surprised
into admiration, and in the middle of the picture is my uncle, making
his first appearance in that Esquimaux costume I have already mentioned,
a short figure, compactly immense, hugely goggled, wearing a sort of
brown rubber proboscis, and surmounted by a table-land of motoring cap.

V

So it was we recognised our new needs as fresh invaders of the upper
levels of the social system, and set ourselves quite consciously to
the acquisition of Style and Savoir Faire. We became part of what is
nowadays quite an important element in the confusion of our world, that
multitude of economically ascendant people who are learning how to spend
money. It is made up of financial people, the owners of the businesses
that are eating up their competitors, inventors of new sources of
wealth, such as ourselves; it includes nearly all America as one sees
it on the European stage. It is a various multitude having only this
in common: they are all moving, and particularly their womankind are
moving, from conditions in which means were insistently finite, things
were few, and customs simple, towards a limitless expenditure and the
sphere of attraction of Bond Street, Fifth Avenue, and Paris. Their
general effect is one of progressive revolution, of limitless rope.

They discover suddenly indulgences their moral code never foresaw and
has no provision for, elaborations, ornaments, possessions beyond their
wildest dreams. With an immense astonished zest they begin shopping
begin a systematic adaptation to a new life crowded and brilliant
with things shopped, with jewels, maids, butlers, coachmen, electric
broughams, hired town and country houses. They plunge into it as
one plunges into a career; as a class, they talk, think, and dream
possessions. Their literature, their Press, turns all on that; immense
illustrated weeklies of unsurpassed magnificence guide them in domestic
architecture, in the art of owning a garden, in the achievement of the
sumptuous in motor-cars, in an elaborate sporting equipment, in the
purchase and control of their estates, in travel and stupendous hotels.
Once they begin to move they go far and fast. Acquisition becomes the
substance of their lives. They find a world organised