They were just women, in whose elegance I had no belief, and
whose clothes seemed to me unimportant. But when a belief vanishes, there
survives it--more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of the
power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomena--an
idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once
animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine
spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent
cause--the death of the gods.
"Oh, horrible!" I exclaimed to myself: "Does anyone really imagine that
these motor-cars are as smart as the old carriage-and-pair? I dare say. I
am too old now--but I was not intended for a world in which women shackle
themselves in garments that are not even made of cloth. To what purpose
shall I walk among these trees if there is nothing left now of the
assembly that used to meet beneath the delicate tracery of reddening
leaves, if vulgarity and fatuity have supplanted the exquisite thing that
once their branches framed? Oh, horrible! My consolation is to think of
the women whom I have known, in the past, now that there is no standard
left of elegance.
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