"Ragtime"

<Modern beauty:>

• A woman's profile, like a new constellation, embossed the night sky. Showers of light, red and white and blue, fell like stars and burst again, like bombs, over the old steamer down at the water.
• He could feel the sensitive wings take on an intelligence of their own, as if a disembodied presence had joined the enterprise. The machine lifted off the ground. 
  
• Small clear chords hung in the air like flowers. The melodies were like bouquets. There seemed to be no other possibilities for life than those delineated by the music.
• The boy perceived it as light touching various places in space, accumulating in intricate patterns until the entire room was made to glow with its own being.
  

<More footnotes:>

• The great Edison himself, the man who invented the Twentieth Century, had theorized that irreducible particles of life-charged matter, which he called swarms, subsisted after death and could never be destroyed .
• Dr. James had called the habit of inferiority to the full self.
• Mrs. Fish was one of the Four Hundred. She was famous for her wit. Once she had given a ball at which everyone had to talk baby talk.
• All this began to change when Taft moved into the White House. His accession to the one mythic office in the American imagination weighed everyone down. His great figure immediately expressed the apotheosis of that style of man.
  

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