All round are the “second generation”: young men, of whom it was said that “if only they had had a little more brains, they would have been half-witted”: women “who boast of never appearing twice in the same gown”; one dreadful personage in Boston who wears each costume once, and then has it solemnly cremated by her butler: women who artificially make themselves barren, because of the inconvenience incidental to motherhood, and lavish their affections upon cats and dogs. “It was the instinct of decoration, perverted by the money-lust.” The men are busy making money in order that their idle women may attain supremacy in this mad race for display. The “second generation” are so bored that ever more fantastic amusements are sought to stimulate jaded interest. The one thing they all dread is “to be left alone.” “There was a woman who had her teeth filled with diamonds; and another who was driving a pair of zebras. One heard of monkey dinners and pyjama dinners at Newport, of horseback dinners and vegetable dances in New York.” “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 weekly study of Plato.” People’s health broke down quickly in face of this furious pursuit of pleasure; then they ate nothing but spinach, or lived on grass, or chewed a mouthful of soup thirty-two times before swallowing it. “There were ‘rest cures’ and ‘water cures,’ ‘new thought’ and ‘metaphysical healing’ and ‘Christian Science.’” The young men were filled with the same delusion as the older women. “Some were killing themselves and other people in automobile races at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.” “There was another young millionaire who sat and patiently taught Sunday School, in the presence of a host of reporters: there was another who set up a chain of newspapers all over the country, and made war against his class.” Behind this second generation there was even the vision of a third, growing up in the heart of such a nightmare: a third generation in which there would no longer remain even the memories of the early struggles of the pioneers of great fortunes to connect them with reality.