Nothing of the past remained untouched.

Not the old buildings, not the old trees, not even the old memories.

Clustering traditions had fled in the white blaze of electricity; the quaint brick walks, with their rich colour in the sunlight, were beginning to disappear beneath the expressionless mask of concrete.

It was all changed since his father's or his grandfather's day; it was all obvious and cheap, he thought; it was all ugly and naked and undistinguished--yet the tide of the new ideas was still rising.
Democracy, relentless, disorderly, and strewn with the wreckage of finer things, had overwhelmed the world of established customs in which he lived.
As he lifted his face to the sky, his grave young features revealed a subtle kinship to the statues beneath the mounted Washington in the drive, as if both flesh and bronze had been moulded by the dominant spirit of race.

Like the heroes of the Revolution, he appeared a stranger in an age which had degraded manners and enthroned commerce; and like them also he seemed to survey the present from some inaccessible height of the past.