[The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington]@TWC D-Link bookThe Magnificent Ambersons CHAPTER X 2/17
With his airs of young milord, his fast horses, his gold and silver cigarette-cases, his clothes from a New York tailor, his recklessness of money showered upon him by indulgent mothers or doting grandfathers, he respects nothing and nobody.
He is blase if you please.
Watch him at a social function how condescendingly he deigns to select a partner for the popular waltz or two step how carelessly he shoulders older people out of his way, with what a blank stare he returns the salutation of some old acquaintance whom he may choose in his royal whim to forget! The unpleasant part of all this is that the young women he so condescendingly selects as partners for the dance greet him with seeming rapture, though in their hearts they must feel humiliated by his languid hauteur, and many older people beam upon him almost fawningly if he unbends so far as to throw them a careless, disdainful word! One wonders what has come over the new generation.
Of such as these the Republic was not made.
Let us pray that the future of our country is not in the hands of these fin-de-siecle gilded youths, but rather in the calloused palms of young men yet unknown, labouring upon the farms of the land.
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