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eighteenth centuries, loading their rooms with Sèvres porcelain, with Louis-of-whatever-numeral furniture, with Fragonard paintings and Michelangelo drawings and Gobelin tapestries. With commodes and console tables, with bronzes and bergères.
    There was so much money now, and so much more to be had. And so easily! Railroads and steel and coal and lumber; monopolies and pools and trusts. The Steel Trust. The Cotton Trust. The Whiskey Trust. The Sugar Trust and the Cottonseed Trust and the Linseed Oil Trust. Monopolies meant money; and money meant more money again.
    And so the money poured from the hands of the many to the few. No longer did a rich man own a factory, or a business, or a store. Now, rich men owned industries. No longer did a rich man see the faces of his workers. He saw only the faces of the rich.
    And so the money moved. From the plains of the Midwest, from the small cities, from the towns. And as it moved it changed, shrinking down from acres of wheat or blocks of factories to bits of paper that passed from one hand to another. The money moved to New York, to the big-fisted men on Wall Street.
    And New York responded with theaters and hotels and balls lavish beyond anything that had ever been seen before. There were more than enough ways to spend money, loads of it. Oh, it was fine! A fine time to be a businessman with nerve. A fine time to be rich.
    And at Delmonico’s, on a cold, starry evening in February, the social season in full swing, money spilled onto the sidewalks, streaming from carriages like the warm golden light of Delmonico’s itself. Satin and lace and fur, white waistcoats, and everywhere diamonds reflecting gaslight and the flickering reflection of thousands of candles and the light of other diamonds around other fair necks. The world had begun to glitter, as hard and brilliant as the new electric light looked next to soft gaslight, and no where did it glitter more brightly than at Delmonico’s.
    The Van Cormandts were giving a ball, and everyone was there. The fastidious exclusion that Mrs. Astor had practiced was disappearing, almost entirely gone now. Once not long ago her friend Mr. Ward McAllister had decreed that four hundred names were what constituted society, simply because it was the absolute limit of people who would fit into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. But now those New York families rubbed elbows with the newly rich and fashionable who had managed in a few short years to follow the shining example of the Vanderbilts and claw their way to a position in society, simply by spending more money than the old families ever could. It had begun in 1883, when Mrs. Astor had left her card at the residence of Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, who she had formerly failed to recognize, in order to get the Astors invited to Mrs. Vanderbilt’s fancy dress ball. No matter that Mrs. Astor did it for the sake of her daughter Carrie. The Queen had paid her call, after years of snubbing those parvenu Vanderbilts, and the limestone and marble walls came tumbling down.
    So, in this fine February of 1888, the Vanderbilts and the Whitneys certainly thought themselves the equals of the Astors. Or if they didn’t, if any vestiges of the embarrassment due to old Cornelius Van der Bilt beginning his fortunes as a ferryman crossing the river to Staten Island, they kept it to themselves. Mrs. Astor even rubbed elbows with the charming Mrs. Paran Stevens, the daughter of a tradesman. Even the notorious Columbine Nash was present this evening, resplendent in a gown of gold, her honey-blond hair piled high. If there were those who whispered about Ned Van Cormandt’s visits to her little house on Twenty-third Street and the too-exposed bosom of her dress, Columbine Nash didn’t seem to care. She appeared to be having a marvelous time. As were the Livingstons, the Jays, the Van Rensselaers, the Kings, the Gallatins, the Goelets, and the Rhinelanders. Everyone was having a marvelous time.