Edith Wharton

“ The dining-room at the Nouveau Luxe represented, on such a spring evening, what unbounded material power had devised for the delusion of its leisure: a phantom "society," with all the rules, smirks, gestures of its model, but evoked out of promiscuity and incoherence while the other had been the product of continuity and choice. And the instinct which had driven a new class of world-compellers to bind themselves to slavish imitation of the superseded, and their prompt and reverent faith in the reality of the sham they had created, seemed to Bowen the most satisfying proof of human permanence. ”

“ It's such a refreshing change from our institutions--which are, nevertheless, the necessary foundations of society. But just as one may have an infinite admiration for one's wife, and yet occasionally--" he waved a light hand toward the spectacle. "This, in the social order, is the diversion, the permitted diversion, that your original race has devised: a kind of superior Bohemia, where one may be respectable without being bored."
Bowen laughed. "You've put it in a nutshell: the ideal of the American woman is to be respectable without being bored ”

“ Bowen laughed again. "She'd be as safe as in a bank! Nothing ever goes on! Nothing that ever happens here is real."
"Ah, quant � cela--" the Frenchman murmured, inserting a fork into his melon. Bowen looked at him with enjoyment--he was such a precious foot-note to the page! The two men, accidentally thrown together some years previously during a trip up the Nile, always met again with pleasure when Bowen returned to France. Raymond de Chelles, who came of a family of moderate fortune, lived for the greater part of the year on his father's estates in Burgundy ”