blind materialism.
Such expectations as Montague had brought with him had been derived
from the literature of Europe; in a grand monde such as this, he
expected to meet diplomats and statesmen, scientists and explorers,
philosophers and poets and painters. But one never heard anything about
such people in Society. It was a mark of eccentricity to be interested
in intellectual affairs, and one might go about for weeks and not meet
a person with an idea. When these people read, it was a sugar-candy
novel, and when they went to the play, it was a musical comedy. The one
single intellectual product which it could point to as its own, was a
rancid scandal-sheet, used mainly as a means of blackmail. Now and then
some aspiring young matron of the "elite" would try to set up a salon
after the fashion of the continent, and would gather a few feeble wits
about her for a time. But for the most part the intellectual workers of
the city held themselves severely aloof; and Society was left a little
clique of people whose fortunes had become historic in a decade or two,
and who got together in each other's palaces and gorged themselves, and
gambled and gossiped about each other, and wove about their
personalities a veil of awful and exclusive majesty.

Montague found himself thinking that perhaps it was not they who were
to blame. It was not they who had set up wealth as the end and goal of
things--it was the whole community, of which they were a part. It was
not their fault that they had been left with power and nothing to use
it for; it was not their fault that their sons and daughters found
themselves stranded in the world, deprived of all necessity, and of the
possibility of doing anything useful.

The most pitiful aspect of the whole thing to Montague was this "second
generation" who were coming upon the scene, with their lives all
poisoned in advance. No wrong which they could do to the world would
ever equal the wrong which the world had done them, in permitting them
to have money which they had not earned. They were cut off for ever
from reality, and from the possibility of understanding life; they had
big, healthy bodies, and they craved experience--and they had
absolutely nothing to do. That was the real meaning of all this orgy of
dissipation--this "social whirl" as it was called; it was the frantic
chase of some new thrill, some excitement that would stir the senses of
people who had nothing in the world to interest them