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Scores of these palace owners have or seem to have no way of getting acquainted with anybody whatsoever. There are millionaires’ families that stare drearily out of the windows, bored to death in their isolation, and wishing they were back in the Western town where they used to have lots of fun. There are others who give entertainments in the vast rooms of their palaces at which you will find their clerks, a few nondescripts male and female, and no others—these standing or strolling awkwardly about, trying to forget that they are miserable in reflecting on the cost of the pictures and the decorations.

In the surroundings above outlined, how could anyone, whether newly rich or long rich, lead other than a sordid life? Money is there necessarily the basis of all action, the determiner of the complexion of every thought.

To the narrow vision of the palace dweller and of those who look only at palace dwellers, America seems like a greedy, ill-mannered child released upon a candy shop. In the wide, the true aspect it seems a man, intelligently developing himself, fevered by a sense of the shortness of life and the vastness of its opportunities.