Book excerpt: "A Season of Splendor takes you on a spectacular journey through this Gilded Age, the period from roughly the 1870s to 1914, when old-money bluebloods and patricians confronted the nouveau riche - railway barons, steel magnates, and Wall Street speculators - and forged an uneasy and dazzling new social order in New York City. Together, their extreme wealth, elaborate parties, marble mansions, shocking excesses, and delicious scandals transformed the social, architectural, and sartorial landscape."--BOOK JACKET.