As the woman removed, from tray after tray, the tissue-paper-enfolded layers of garments, Lady Anstruthers sat and watched her with normal, simply feminine interest growing in her eyes.  The things were made with the absence of any limit in expenditure, the freedom with delicate stuffs and priceless laces which belonged only to her faint memories of a lost past.

Nothing had limited the time spent in the embroidering of this apparently simple linen frock and coat; nothing had restrained the hand holding the scissors which had cut into the lace which adorned in appliques and filmy frills this exquisitely charming ball dress.

“It is looking back so far,” she said, waving her hand towards them with an odd gesture.  “To think that it was once all like—­like that.”

She got up and went to the things, turning them over, and touching them with a softness, almost expressing a caress.  The names of the makers stamped on bands and collars, the names of the streets in which their shops stood, moved her.  She heard again the once familiar rattle of wheels, and the rush and roar of New York traffic.

Betty carried on the whole matter with lightness.  She talked easily and casually, giving local colour to what she said.  She described the abnormally rapid growth of the places her sister had known in her teens, the new buildings, new theatres, new shops, new people, the later mode of living, much of it learned from England, through the unceasing weaving of the Shuttle.

“Changing—­changing—­changing.  That is what it is always doing—­America.  We have not reached repose yet.  One wonders how long it will be before we shall.  Now we are always hurrying breathlessly after the next thing—­the new one—­which we always think will be the better one.  Other countries built themselves slowly.  In the days of their building, the pace of life was a march.  When America was born, the march had already begun to hasten, and as a nation we began, in our first hour, at the quickening speed.  Now the pace is a race.  New York is a kaleidoscope.  I myself can remember it a wholly different thing.  One passes down a street one day, and the next there is a great gap where some building is being torn down—­a few days later, a tall structure of some sort is touching the sky.  It is wonderful, but it does not tend to calm the mind.  That is why we cross the Atlantic so much.  The sober, quiet-loving blood our forbears brought from older countries goes in search of rest.  Mixed with other things, I feel in my own being a resentment against newness and disorder, and an insistence on the atmosphere of long-established things.”

But for years Lady Anstruthers had been living in the atmosphere of long-established things, and felt no insistence upon it.  She yearned to hear of the great, changing Western world—­of the great, changing city.  Betty must tell her what the changes were.  What were the differences in the streets—­where had the new buildings been placed?  How had Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue and Broadway altered?  Were not Gramercy Park and Madison Square still green with grass and trees?  Was it all different?  Would she not know the old places herself?  Though it seemed a lifetime since she had seen them, the years which had passed were really not so many.