Michael Malone - Weebly

ailway car stuffed with purple plush. A car of couches
with its own potted palm tree. A car with a dining table
over which hung allegorical oil paintings, heavily framed.
A car with a big bronze Atalanta, interrupting her race
to stoop for the golden apple and dreamily staring out
the window at landscapes running the other way. Gone
now were those plush, gilded days when trains went on
pilgrimages to shrines of victors in Newport and
Saratoga Springs, when so fast and deep the money
flowed along the Hudson, the Housatonic, and even the
little Rampage that it took a substantial traffic in railway
cars to hurry owners to property, and guests to owners.
Those days had passed when everyone knew who
everyone-who-was-anyone was.
Those thick damask days when Vanderbilts,
Whitneys, and even Dingleys had passed their ample,
untaxed time in paying calls on one another, in marrying
one another, breeding money with one another, and
heavily entombing one another.
All lost now—houses, horses, and purple plush.
"Goddamn fool taxes and the goddamn Roosevelts,"
old William Bredforet had often told his great-nephew