The tradition of vacation and of the country was preserved in such
terms as "cottage." You would be invited to a "lawn-party," and you
would find a blaze of illumination, and potted plants enough to fill
a score of green-houses, and costumes and jewelled splendour
suggesting the Field of the Cloth of Gold. You would be invited to a
"picnic" at Gooseberry Point, and when you went there, you would
find gorgeous canopies spread overhead, and velvet carpets under
foot, and scores of liveried lackeys in attendance, and every luxury
one would have expected in a Fifth Avenue mansion. You would take a
cab to drive to this "picnic," and it would cost you five dollars;
yet you must on no account go without a cab. Even if the destination
was just around the corner, a stranger would commit a breach of the
proprieties if he were to approach the house on foot.

Coming to Newport as Montague did, directly from the Mississippi
Steel Mills, produced the strangest possible effect upon him. He had
seen the social splurge in the Metropolis, and had heard the
fabulous prices that people had paid for things. But these thousands
and millions had seemed mere abstractions. Now suddenly they had
become personified--he had seen where they came from, where all the
luxury and splendour were produced! And with every glance that he
cast at the magnificence about him, he thought of the men who were
toiling in the blinding heat of the blast-furnaces.

Here was the palace of the Wymans, upon the laying out of the
grounds of which a half million dollars had been spent; the stone
wall which surrounded it was famous upon two continents, because it
had cost a hundred thousand dollars. And it was to make steel rails
for the Wymans that the slaves of the mills were toiling!