"Going all the way to New York?"
"Yes."
"Live there?"
"No. Do you?"
"Yes, since my marriage."
"Do you like it?"
"New York is not a point of view, my dear. It's a habit. Your system
comes to demand it just as an opium fiend comes to require so many
pipefuls. You know it's bad for you, but the fumes are delicious."
"What fumes?"
"The fumes of the metropolis, my dear. The perfumes of wealth. The next
best to being Mrs. Four Hundred herself is to walk past her Fifth Avenue
home and see her step out of her automobile."
"I suppose so, if wealth is what one craves most."
"It isn't a craving in New York; it's a necessity. But to those of us to
whom life is pretty much of a compromise anyway, there is something in
mere propinquity to wealth that is like smelling into a tumbler with its
sides still wet from some rare old chartreuse. It isn't filling, but
it's heady."
"That's exactly the way I feel about life; it's worth going after if you
only get the aroma. If I can't be Venus, then let me be the star dust
that is nearest to her!"
It seemed to Lilly that she was suddenly talking to her own kind.
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