The Kaleidoscope of the World

Newland archer felt his heart beating with the confusion and eagerness of youth. He wondered if it was thus that his sons conducted itself in the presence of miss fanny beaufer, and decided that it was not. The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're always going to get whatever they want, he reflected. Nothing could more clearly give the measure of the distance that the world had travelled. People nowadays were too busy, busy with reforms and movements, with fads and fetishes and frivolities, to bother much about their neighbours. And of what account was anybody's past an? All the social atoms spun around on the same plane.