Читать книгу The Reign of Gilt онлайн
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The most interesting person in the family is the mother. She is its moving force, one of the moving forces in the extravagant life of New York City to-day. You see her name and her pictures in the newspapers very often, always in connection with the news that she is doing something. She was the first in New York to have huge flunkeys in gaudy knee-breeches and silk stockings in waiting at her front door. She was the first to have as an entertainment for a few people after dinner several of the grand opera stars and the finest orchestra in the country. She is a woman with ideas—ideas for new and not noisy or gaudy, but attractive ostentations of luxury. She spends money recklessly, but she gets what she wants.
She is one of the busiest women in town. And the main part of her business is one which engages New York women, and men, too, ever more and more—the fight for prolonging youth.
You would never suspect that she is the mother of a son twenty-five years old. Indeed, you would not suspect from her looks or her conversation that she is a mother. She is making her fight for youth most successfully. Of course, she uses no artifices—the New York women who care greatly about looks have long since abandoned artificiality, except as a fad. Her hair is thick and dark and fine. It is her own, kept vigorous by constant treatment. Her skin is clear and smooth and healthily pale—it costs her and her beauty assistants hours of labor to keep it thus. Her figure is tall and slender and girlish—her masseuse could tell you how that is done. She lives, eats, exercises, with the greatest regularity. And she eats little and drinks less.