It was good for her to talk and be talked to in this manner Betty saw.  Still handling her subject lightly, she presented picture after picture.  Some of them were of the wonderful, feverish city itself—­the place quite passionately loved by some, as passionately disliked by others.  She herself had fallen into the habit, as she left childhood behind her, of looking at it with interested wonder—­at its riot of life and power, of huge schemes, and almost superhuman labours, of fortunes so colossal that they seemed monstrosities in their relation to the world.  People who in Rosalie’s girlhood had lived in big ugly brownstone fronts, had built for themselves or for their children, houses such as, in other countries, would have belonged to nobles and princes, spending fortunes upon their building, filling them with treasures brought from foreign lands, from palaces, from art galleries, from collectors.  Sometimes strange people built such houses and lived strange lavish, ostentatious lives in them, forming an overstrained, abnormal, pleasure-chasing world of their own.  The passing of even ten years in New York counted itself almost as a generation; the fashions, customs, belongings of twenty years ago wore an air of almost picturesque antiquity.

“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.  Their way of being weary of it would be different from hers, they would be weary only of hearing of the mountains of it which rolled themselves up, as it seemed, in obedience to some irresistible, occult force.