"Real Pearls and Darned Stockings" consists of a series of amusing, revealing vignettes relating to the inexorable changing of The Old Guard in the Roosevelt/Livingston Hudson Valley. During the last half of the twentieth century, Edith Wharton's marvelous world of elegant society, good and proper manners, indoor swimming pools, private golf clubs -- real pearls and darned stockings -- became transformed by an upwardly mobile generation, the environmentally aware New Guard.