The Old Maid

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"Nineteenth-century America was gone; twentieth-century America was alien. "All that I thought American in a true sense is gone, and I see nothing but vain-glory, crassness and a total ignorance . . . ," she wrote. She began to reconsider the old, lost world. What had seemed once petty and insular now seemed valuable and dignified; the rules, she saw, had been founded on moral principle. "I am steeping myself in the nineteenth century," she wrote, ". . . such a blessed refuge from the turmoil and mediocrity of today-like taking sanctuary in a mighty temple." Edith Wharton, The Old Maid

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