One would take to slumming and another to sniffing brandy through the nose; one had a table-cover made of woven roses, and another was wearing perfumed flannel at sixteen dollars a yard; one had inaugurated ice-skating in August, and another had started a class for the study of Plato.  Some were giving tennis tournaments in bathing-suits, and playing leap-frog after dinner; others had got dispensations from the Pope, so that they might have private chapels and confessors; and yet others were giving “progressive dinners,” moving from one restaurant to another—­a cocktail and blue-points at Sherry’s, a soup and Madeira at Delmonico’s, some terrapin with amontillado at the Waldorf—­and so on.

One of the consequences of the furious pace was that people’s health broke down very quickly; and there were all sorts of bizarre ways of restoring it.  One person would be eating nothing but spinach, and another would be living on grass.  One would chew a mouthful of soup thirty-two times; another would eat every two hours, and another only once a week.  Some went out in the early morning and walked bare-footed in the grass, and others went hopping about the floor on their hands and knees to take off fat.  There were “rest cures” and “water cures,” “new thought” and “metaphysical healing” and “Christian Science”; there was an automatic horse, which one might ride indoors, with a register showing the distance travelled.  Montague met one man who had an electric machine, which cost thirty thousand dollars, and which took hold of his arms and feet and exercised him while he waited.  Ho met a woman who told him she was riding an electric camel!

Everywhere one went there were new people, spending their money in new and incredible ways.  Here was a man who had bought a chapel and turned it into a theatre, and hired professional actors, and persuaded his friends to come and see him act Shakespeare.  Hero was a woman who costumed herself after figures in famous paintings, with arrangements of roses and cherry leaves, and wreaths of ivy and laurel—­and with costumes for her pet dogs to match!  Hero was a man who paid six dollars a day for a carnation four inches across; and a girl who wore a hat trimmed with fresh morning-glories, and a ball costume with swarms of real butterflies tied with silk threads; and another with a hat made of woven silver, with ostrich plumes forty inches long made entirely of silvei films.  Here was a man who hired a military company to drill all day long to prepare a floor for dancing; and another who put up a building at a cost of thirty thousand dollars to give a debutante dance for his daughter, and then had it torn down the day aftor.  Here was a man who bred rattlesnakes and turned them loose by thousands, and had driven everybody away from the North Carolina estate of one of the Wallings.  Here was a man who was building himself a yacht with a model dairy and bakery on board, and a French laundry and a brass band.  Here was a million-dollar racing-yacht with auto-boats on it and a platoon of marksmen, and some Chinese laundrymen, and two physicians for its half-insane occupant.  Here was a man who had bought a Rhine castle for three-quarters of a million, and spent as much in restoring it, and filled it with servants dressed in fourteenth-century costumes.  Here was a five-million-dollar art collection hidden away where nobody ever saw it!