Appendix
inal homestead in Astor Place, just around the corner,
hard by the Academy, where music was sometimes
heard, the sombre gayety, the sure-footed, square-cut
frivolity of Fifth Avenue but a stone's-throw away-
were given over to Bohemia and the Bohemians; greater
space and seclusion, a wider amplitude of architectural
display, were required to meet the bizarre taste of the
army contractors and the stock-brokers and the length-
ening shoddy line of those who had made a profit out
of the opportunities of the time, shall we say out of the
travail of their country and their countrymen So,
the uptown move began, and along with it the down-
grade of fashion.
  With magical rapidity wealth had already started to
accumulate; fortunes to be multiplied; millionaires to
become as plentiful as blackberries; common; not only
common in quantity, but in quality, likewise. Central
Park was made to the very hands of these. That they
should build their grandiose palaces near it was inevi-
table.
  In the early seventies Fisk stood for the horrid ex-
ample just as Devery stands now. The show was the
thing; the "turn-out," as they called it. The Four
Hundred had come neither to their patrimony nor their
patronymic. But they existed in a crude, coarse way,
expressing themselves in bang-tails and shirt-fronts and
shiners; a trifle too brazen and noisy, perhaps, but un-
deniably rich. The men had not yet learned the stony
stare and the brutal swagger of the bucks of the Jardin
Mabille and the titled bruisers of the Argyle Rooms.
The women were still women-God bless them !-a
little vulgarized by so much money, but ignorant of the
pinchbeck airs and graces of the demi-mondaine and the
unspeakable dirt of London and Paris.
  Yet, then, as now, the best people, no matter how
rich, turned silently aside, and gave them the middle of
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