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.
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.