Hudson River Bracketed by Edith Wharton

The next morning Vance went early to Mrs. Mennenkoop's. He wanted to see his grandmother before she began to be besieged by the prophets and seers who had been such a trial to Mrs. Weston when the Scrimsers came to live under her roof. All night he had lain awake, torn between his disillusionment and his wrath against those who had shared it. Those damned unsatisfied people who always had to have some new sensation to batten on! Why had they dragged his grandmother out of Euphoria, where she belonged, persuaded her that New York was in need of her, that she had a "message" for them, as her jargon called it? Such wrath as he had felt against the rich after Mrs. Pulsifer's rebuff now blazed up in him against these ridiculous "Seekers"--seekers of new sensations, new catchwords, new fads to take up or to turn to ridicule! At Euphoria Mrs. Scrimser had her place in the social order. She was more persuasive than the ministers of the rival churches, better educated than their congregations. She had an authority which no one questioned--except Mrs. Weston, who saw no sense in telling people how to run their lives when you couldn't manage your own hired girl.

Here in New York everything was different--and Vance himself, in the interval, had grown different. The world had come to have a perspective for him, and Euphoria was a hardly perceptible dot far off between two narrowing lines. But in proportion as he understood this, and suffered for his grandmother, his tenderness for her increased. It became defensive and fierce; he would have jumped at the chance of doing battle for her against all the Frensides and Spears. After all, wasn't his own case precisely hers? He too was the raw product of a Middle-Western town, trying to do something beyond his powers, to tell the world about things he wasn't really familiar with; his pride winced at the exactness of the analogy, and it moved him to acuter sympathy. If only he could persuade his grandmother to give up this crazy crusade; to go back to Euphoria, and take him and Laura Lou with her! He made up his mind, on the way out to Bronxville, that he would propose to her to break her lecturing engagements and go back at once.