‘[Violet] was weary . . . weary . . . weary; the old, exquisite pattern growing dim . . . civilization coming to pieces . . . and Violet knowing it . . . because she had reached the last phase, which is consciousness of the relative state and where, if one belongs to the old order, the wave at its crest sights the shore and falls back into dissolution. Violet was, of all the people I have ever known of the old world (and by the old world I mean the thought, the feeling, and the knowing of the past) the highest evolved, the one who had reached the farthest. She held all the past within her, and she felt the end was near at hand: she spoke often of the debacle that was upon the heels of the world, upon her own heels—of everything going under. She could not do anything about life. She could scarcely live in actions at all: all her living was of the intuition—a culture that she and her psychic ancestors had created and cultivated, carrying its increasing weight through endless generations, and that I and my kind would take over and perhaps painlessly, without effort, carry over into the new life in which she would have no part, her work being ended.’
— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933
