“We here reach a period when New York society turned over a new leaf,” wrote Ward McAllister ten years later, reflecting on Alva’s ball in the book that would be his undoing. “Up to this time, for one to be worth a million of dollars was to be rated a man of fortune, but now, bygones must be bygones. New York’s ideas as to values, when fortune was named, leaped boldly up to ten millions, fifty millions, one hundred millions, and the necessities and luxuries followed suit.”
