"What has she done?" he asked curiously. His sister's eyes were searching his very diligently, as though in quest of something elusive; and he gazed serenely back, the most unsuspicious of smiles touching his mouth. "Phil, dear, a young girl--a very young girl--is a vapid and uninteresting proposition to a man of thirty-five; isn't she?" "Rather--in some ways." "In what way is she not?" "Well--to me, for example--she is acceptable as children are acceptable--a blessed, sweet, clean relief from the women of the Fanes' set, for example?" "Like Rosamund?" "Yes. And, Ninette, you and Austin seem to be drifting out of the old circles--the sort that you and I were accustomed to. You don't mind my saying it, do you?--but there were so many people in this town who had something besides millions--amusing, well-bred, jolly people who had no end of good times, but who didn't gamble and guzzle and stuff themselves and their friends--who were not eternally hanging around other people's wives. Where are they, dear?" "If you are indicting all of my friends, Phil--" "I don't mean all of your friends--only a small proportion--which, however, connects your circle with that deadly, idle, brainless bunch--the insolent chatterers at the opera, the gorged dowagers, the worn-out, passionless men, the enervated matrons of the summer capital, the chlorotic squatters on huge yachts, the speed-mad fugitives from the furies of ennui, the neurotic victims of mental cirrhosis, the jewelled animals whose moral code is the code of the barnyard--!" "Philip!" "Oh, I don't mean that they are any more vicious than the idle and mentally incompetent in any walk of life. East Side, West Side, Harlem, Hell's Kitchen, Fifth Avenue, Avenue A, and Abingdon Square--the denizens are only locally different, not specifically--the species remains unchanged. But everywhere, in every quarter and class and set and circle there is always the depraved; and the logical links that connect them are unbroken from Fifth Avenue to Chinatown, from the half-crazed extravagances of the Orchils' Louis XIV ball to a New Year's reception at the Haymarket where Troy Lil's diamonds outshine the phony pearls of Hoboken Fanny, and Hatpin Molly leads the spiel with Clarence the Pig." "Phil, you are too disgusting!" "I'm sorry--it isn't very nice of me, I suppose. But, dear, I'm dead tired of moral squalor. I do like the brightness of things, too, but I don't care for the phosphorescence of social decay." "What in the world is the matter?" she exclaimed in dismay. "You are talking like the wildest socialist."