"I've noticed. You people say yours is the more materialistic age, but it isn't that. Other eras were just as wild about possessing objects of wealth and luxury." She gestured against the table, spreading her hands out, laying one flat. Her fingertips curved enough against the tablecloth when she tapped for her nails to evoke the image of claws. "But nowadays it's this frantic obsession with owning things, keeping them, hoarding them like a particularly cluttered and useless dragon's treasure. It's all about domination."

A perverse pathetic domination, she thought more specifically but did not add. The pyramids were before her time but even she could appreciate their lesson. And what did the 21st century would-be pharaohs have? Wall Street and blackberries. Commissioned memoirs and yachts. Sad, really. How far out of balance had come the sense of scale.