Title: A Backward Glance
Author: Edith Wharton
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Title: A Backward Glance
Author: Edith Wharton




"A backward glance o'er travell'd roads."
Walt Whitman.

"Je veux remonter le penchant de mes belles annees..."
Chateaubriand: "Memoires d'outre tombe."

"Kein Genuss ist vorubergehend."
Goethe: "Wilhelm Meister."


To the friends
who every year on All Souls' Night
come and sit with me
by the fire.


A FIRST WORD.

Years ago I said to myself: "There's no such thing as old age; there is
only sorrow."

I have learned with the passing of time that this, though true, is not
the whole truth. The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly
process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day
after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from
cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only
alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary;
it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that
must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one CAN
remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is
unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in
big things, and happy in small ways. In the course of sorting and
setting down of my memories I have learned that these advantages are
usually independent of one's merits, and that I probably owe my happy
old age to the ancestor who accidentally endowed me with these
qualities.

Another advantage (equally accidental) is that I do not remember long to
be angry. I seldom forget a bruise to the soul--who does? But life puts
a quick balm on it, and it is recorded in a book I seldom open. Not long
ago I read a number of reviews of a recently published autobiography.
All the reviewers united in praising it on the score that here at last
was an autobiographer who was not afraid to tell the truth! And what
gave the book this air of truthfulness? Simply the fact that the
memorialist "spared no one," set down in detail every defect and
absurdity in others, and every resentment in the writer. That was the
kind of autobiography worth reading!

Judged by that standard mine, I fear, will find few readers. I have not
escaped contact with the uncongenial; but the antipathy they aroused was
usually reciprocal, and this simplified and restricted our intercourse.
Nor do I remember that these unappreciative persons ever marked their
lack of interest in me by anything more harmful than indifference. I
recall no sensational grievances. Everywhere on my path I have met with
kindness and furtherance; and from the few dearest to me an exquisite
understanding. It will be seen, then, that in telling my story I have
had to make the best of unsensational material; and if what I have to
tell interests my readers, that merit at least will be my own.

Madame Swetchine, that eminent Christian, was once asked how she managed
to feel Christianly toward her enemies. She looked surprised. "Un
ennemi? Mais de tous les accidents c'est le plus rare!"

So I have found it.

Several chapters of this book have already appeared in the "Atlantic
Monthly" and "The Ladies' Home Journal." I have also to thank Sir John
Murray for kindly permitting me to incorporate in the book two or three
passages from an essay on Henry James, published in "The Quarterly
Review" of July 1920 and the Editor of "The Colophon" for the use of a
few paragraphs on the writing of "Ethan Frome."

E. W.


CONTENTS.

A FIRST WORD.

CHAPTER 1. THE BACKGROUND.

CHAPTER 2. KNEE-HIGH.

CHAPTER 3. LITTLE GIRL.

CHAPTER 4. UNRELUCTANT FEET.

CHAPTER 5. FRIENDSHIPS AND TRAVELS.

CHAPTER 6. LIFE AND LETTERS.

CHAPTER 7. NEW YORK AND THE MOUNT.

CHAPTER 8. HENRY JAMES.

CHAPTER 9. THE SECRET GARDEN.

CHAPTER 10. LONDON, "QU'ACRE" AND "LAMB."

CHAPTER 11. PARIS.

CHAPTER 12. WIDENING WATERS.

CHAPTER 13. THE WAR.

CHAPTER 14. AND AFTER.


***


A BACKWARD GLANCE.


CHAPTER 1. THE BACKGROUND.

Gute Gesellschaft hab ich gesehen; man nennt sie die gute Wenn sie zum
kleinsten Gedicht nicht die Gelegenheit giebt.

Goethe: "Venezianische Epigrammen."

1.1.

It was on a bright day of midwinter, in New York. The little girl who
eventually became me, but as yet was neither me nor anybody else in
particular, but merely a soft anonymous morsel of humanity--this little
girl, who bore my name, was going for a walk with her father. The
episode is literally the first thing I can remember about her, and
therefore I date the birth of her identity from that day.

She had been put into her warmest coat, and into a new and very pretty
bonnet, which she had surveyed in the glass with considerable
satisfaction. The bonnet (I can see it today) was of white satin,
patterned with a pink and green plaid in raised velvet. It was all drawn
into close gathers, with a bavolet in the neck to keep out the cold, and
thick ruffles of silky blonde lace under the brim in front. As the air
was very cold a gossamer veil of the finest white Shetland wool was
drawn about the bonnet and hung down over the wearer's round red cheeks
like the white paper filigree over a Valentine; and her hands were
encased in white woollen mittens.

One of them lay in the large safe hollow of her father's bare hand; her
tall handsome father, who was so warm-blooded that in the coldest
weather he always went out without gloves, and whose head, with its
ruddy complexion and intensely blue eyes, was so far aloft that when she
walked beside him she was too near to see his face. It was always an
event in the little girl's life to take a walk with her father, and more
particularly so today, because she had on her new winter bonnet, which
was so beautiful (and so becoming) that for the first time she woke to
the importance of dress, and of herself as a subject for adornment--so
that I may date from that hour the birth of the conscious and feminine
ME in the little girl's vague soul.

The little girl and her father walked up Fifth Avenue: the old Fifth
Avenue with its double line of low brown-stone houses, of a desperate
uniformity of style, broken only--and surprisingly--by two equally
unexpected features: the fenced-in plot of ground where the old Miss
Kennedys' cows were pastured, and the truncated Egyptian pyramid which
so strangely served as a reservoir for New York's water supply. The
Fifth Avenue of that day was a placid and uneventful thoroughfare, along
which genteel landaus, broughams and victorias, and more countrified
vehicles of the "carry-all" and "surrey" type, moved up and down at
decent intervals and a decorous pace. On Sundays after church the
fashionable of various denominations paraded there on foot, in gathered
satin bonnets and tall hats; but at other times it presented long
stretches of empty pavement, so that the little girl, advancing at her
father's side, was able to see at a considerable distance the approach
of another pair of legs, not as long but considerably stockier than her
father's. The little girl was so very little that she never got much
higher than the knees in her survey of grown-up people, and would not
have known, if her father had not told her, that the approaching legs
belonged to his cousin Henry. The news was very interesting, because in
attendance on Cousin Henry was a small person, no bigger than herself,
who must obviously be Cousin Henry's little boy Daniel, and therefore
somehow belong to the little girl. So when the tall legs and the stocky
ones halted for a talk, which took place somewhere high up in the air,
and the small Daniel and Edith found themselves face to face close to
the pavement, the little girl peered with interest at the little boy
through the white woollen mist over her face. The little boy, who was
very round and rosy, looked back with equal interest; and suddenly he
put out a chubby hand, lifted the little girl's veil, and boldly planted
a kiss on her cheek. It was the first time--and the little girl found it
very pleasant.

This is my earliest definite memory of anything happening to me; and it
will be seen that I was wakened to conscious life by the two tremendous
forces of love and vanity.

It may have been just after this memorable day--at any rate it was
nearly at the same time--that a snowy-headed old gentleman with a red
face and a spun-sugar moustache and imperial gave me a white Spitz puppy
which looked as if its coat had been woven out of the donor's luxuriant
locks. The old gentleman, in whose veins ran the purest blood of Dutch
Colonial New York, was called Mr. Lydig Suydam, and I should like his
name to survive till this page has crumbled, for with his gift a new
life began for me. The owning of my first dog made me into a conscious
sentient person, fiercely possessive, anxiously watchful, and woke in me
that long ache of pity for animals, and for all inarticulate beings,
which nothing has ever stilled. How I loved that first "Foxy" of mine,
how I cherished and yearned over and understood him! And how quickly he
relegated all dolls and other inanimate toys to the region of my
everlasting indifference!

I never cared much in my little childhood for fairy tales, or any
appeals to my fancy through the fabulous or legendary. My imagination
lay there, coiled and sleeping, a mute hibernating creature, and at the
least touch of common things--flowers, animals, words, especially the
sound of words, apart from their meaning--it already stirred in its
sleep, and then sank back into its own rich dream, which needed so
little feeding from the outside that it instinctively rejected whatever
another imagination had already adorned and completed. There was,
however, one fairy tale at which I always thrilled--the story of the boy
who could talk with the birds and hear what the grasses said. Very
early, earlier than my conscious memory can reach, I must have felt
myself to be of kin to that happy child. I cannot remember when the
grasses first spoke to me, though I think it was when, a few years
later, one of my uncles took me, with some little cousins, to spend a
long spring day in some marshy woods near Mamaroneck, where the earth
was starred with pink trailing arbutus, where pouch-like white and rosy
flowers grew in a swamp, and leafless branches against the sky were
netted with buds of mother-of-pearl; but on the day when Foxy was given
to me I learned what the animals say to each other, and to us...

1.2.

The readers (and I should doubtless have been among them) who twenty
years ago would have smiled at the idea that time could transform a
group of bourgeois colonials and their republican descendants into a
sort of social aristocracy, are now better able to measure the formative
value of nearly three hundred years of social observance: the concerted
living up to long-established standards of honour and conduct, of
education and manners. The value of duration is slowly asserting itself
against the welter of change, and sociologists without a drop of
American blood in them have been the first to recognise what the
traditions of three centuries have contributed to the moral wealth of
our country. Even negatively, these traditions have acquired, with the
passing of time, an unsuspected value. When I was young it used to seem
to me that the group in which I grew up was like an empty vessel into
which no new wine would ever again be poured. Now I see that one of its
uses lay in preserving a few drops of an old vintage too rare to be
savoured by a youthful palate; and I should like to atone for my
unappreciativeness by trying to revive that faint fragrance.

If any one had suggested to me, before 1914, to write my reminiscences,
I should have answered that my life had been too uneventful to be worth
recording. Indeed, I had never even thought of recording it for my own
amusement, and the fact that until 1918 I never kept even the briefest
of diaries has greatly hampered this tardy reconstruction. Not until the
successive upheavals which culminated in the catastrophe of 1914 had
"cut all likeness from the name" of my old New York, did I begin to see
its pathetic picturesqueness. The first change came in the 'eighties,
with the earliest detachment of big money-makers from the West, soon to
be followed by the lords of Pittsburgh. But their infiltration did not
greatly affect old manners and customs, since the dearest ambition of
the new-comers was to assimilate existing traditions. Social life, with
us as in the rest of the world, went on with hardly perceptible changes
till the war abruptly tore down the old frame-work, and what had seemed
unalterable rules of conduct became of a sudden observances as quaintly
arbitrary as the domestic rites of the Pharaohs. Between the point of
view of my Huguenot great-great-grandfather, who came from the French
Palatinate to participate in the founding of New Rochelle, and my own
father, who died in 1882, there were fewer differences than between my
father and the post-war generation of Americans. That I was born into a
world in which telephones, motors, electric light, central heating
(except by hot-air furnaces), X-rays, cinemas, radium, aeroplanes and
wireless telegraphy were not only unknown but still mostly unforeseen,
may seem the most striking difference between then and now; but the
really vital change is that, in my youth, the Americans of the original
States, who in moments of crisis still shaped the national point of
view, were the heirs of an old tradition of European culture which the
country has now totally rejected. This rejection (which Mr. Walter
Lippmann regards as the chief cause of the country's present moral
impoverishment) has opened a gulf between those days and these. The
compact world of my youth has receded into a past from which it can only
be dug up in bits by the assiduous relic-hunter; and its smallest
fragments begin to be worth collecting and putting together before the
last of those who knew the live structure are swept away with it.

1.3.

My little-girl life, safe, guarded, monotonous, was cradled in the only
world about which, according to Goethe, it is impossible to write
poetry. The small society into which I was born was "good" in the most
prosaic sense of the term, and its only interest, for the generality of
readers, lies in the fact of its sudden and total extinction, and for
the imaginative few in the recognition of the moral treasures that went
with it. Let me try to call it back...

Once, when I was about fifteen, my parents took me to Annapolis for the
graduating ceremonies of the Naval Academy. In my infancy I had
travelled extensively on the farther side of the globe, and it was
thought high time that I should begin to see something of my own half.

I recall with delight the charming old Academic buildings grouped about
turf and trees, and the smartness of the cadets (among whom were some of
my young friends) in their dress uniforms; and thrilling memories of
speeches, marchings, military music and strawberry ice, flutter
pleasingly about the scene. On the way back we stopped in Baltimore and
Washington, in the days before Charles McKim had seen its possibilities,
and resolved to develop them on Major L'Enfant's lines, was in truth a
doleful desert; and it was a weary and bored little girl who trailed
after her parents through the echoing emptiness of the Capitol, and at
last into the famous Rotunda with its paintings of Revolutionary
victories. Trumbull was little thought of as a painter in those days
(Munkacsky would doubtless have been preferred to him), and when one
great panel after another was pointed out to me, and I was led up first
to the "Surrender of Burgoyne" and then to the "Surrender of
Cornwallis," and told: "There's your great-grandfather," the tall thin
young man in the sober uniform of a general of artillery, leaning
against a cannon in the foreground of one picture, in the other
galloping across the battlefield, impressed me much less than the
beautiful youths to whom I had just said goodbye at Annapolis. If
anything, I was vaguely sorry to have any one belonging to me
represented in those stiff old-fashioned pictures, so visibly inferior
to the battle-scenes of Horace Vernet and Detaille. I remember feeling
no curiosity about my great-grandfather, and my parents said nothing to
rouse my interest in him. The New Yorker of that day was singularly,
inexplicably indifferent to his descent, and my father and mother were
no exception to the rule.

It was many years later that I began to suspect that Trumbull was very
nearly a great painter, and my great-grandfather Stevens very nearly a
great man; but by that time all who had known him, and could have spoken
of him familiarly, had long been dead, and he was no more than a
museum-piece to me. It is a pity, for he must have been worth knowing,
even at second-hand.

On both sides our colonial ancestry goes back for nearly three hundred
years, and on both sides the colonists in question seem to have been
identified since early days with New York, though my earliest Stevens
forbears went first to Massachusetts. Some of the first Steven's
grandsons, however, probably not being of the stripe of religious
fanatic or political reformer to breathe easily in that passionate
province, transferred their activities to the easier-going New York,
where people seem from the outset to have been more interested in making
money and acquiring property than in Predestination and witch-burning. I
have always wondered if those old New Yorkers did not owe their greater
suavity and tolerance to the fact that the Church of England (so little
changed under its later name of Episcopal Church of America) provided
from the first their prevalent form of worship. May not the matchless
beauty of an ancient rite have protected our ancestors from what Huxley
called the "fissiparous tendency of the Protestant sects," sparing them
sanguinary wrangles over uncomprehended points of doctrine, and all
those extravagances of self-constituted prophets and evangelists which
rent and harrowed New England? Milder manners, a greater love of ease,
and a franker interest in money-making and good food, certainly
distinguished the colonial New Yorkers from the conscience-searching
children of the "Mayflower." Apart from some of the old Dutch colonial
families, who continued to follow the "Dutch Reformed" rite, the New
York of my youth was distinctively Episcopalian; and to this happy
chance I owe my early saturation with the noble cadences of the Book of
Common Prayer, and my reverence for an ordered ritual in which the
officiant's personality is strictly subordinated to the rite he
performs.

Colonial New York was mostly composed of merchants and bankers; my own
ancestors were mainly merchant ship-owners, and my great-grandmother
Stevens's wedding-dress, a gauzy Directoire web of embroidered "India
mull," was made for her in India and brought to New York on one of her
father's merchant-men. My mother, who had a hearty contempt for the
tardy discovery of aristocratic genealogies, always said that old New
York was composed of Dutch and British middle-class families, and that
only four or five could show a pedigree leading back to the aristocracy
of their ancestral country. These if I remember rightly, were the Duers,
the Livingstons, the Rutherfurds, the de Grasses and the Van Rensselaers
(descendants, these latter, of the original Dutch "Patroon"). I name
here only families settled in colonial New York; others, from the
southern states, but well known in New York--such as the Fairfaxes,
Carys, Calverts and Whartons--should be added if the list included the
other colonies.

My own ancestry, as far as I know, was purely middle class; though my
family belonged to the same group as this little aristocratic nucleus I
do not think there was any blood-relationship with it. The
Schermerhorns, Joneses, Pendletons, on my father's side, the Stevenses,
Ledyards, Rhinelanders on my mother's, the Gallatins on both, seem all
to have belonged to the same prosperous class of merchants, bankers and
lawyers. It was a society from which all dealers in retail business were
excluded as a matter of course. The man who "kept a shop" was more
rigorously shut out of polite society in the original Thirteen States
than in post-revolutionary France--witness the surprise (and amusement)
of the Paris solicitor, Moreau de St Mery, who, fleeing from the Terror,
earned his living by keeping a bookshop in Philadelphia, and for this
reason, though his shop was the meeting-place of the most blue-blooded
of his fellow emigres, and Talleyrand and the Marquis de la Tour du Pin
were among his intimates, yet could not be invited to the ball given for
Washington's inauguration. So little did the Revolution revolutionize a
society at once middle class and provincial that no retail dealer, no
matter how palatial his shop-front or how tempting his millions, was
received in New York society until long after I was grown up.

My great-grandfather, the Major-General Ebenezer Stevens of the Rotunda,
seems to have been the only marked figure among my forebears. He was
born in Boston in 1751 and, having a pronounced tendency to mechanical
pursuits, was naturally drafted into the artillery at the Revolution. He
served in Lieutenant Adino Paddock's artillery company, and took part in
the "Boston tea-party," where, as he told one of his sons, "none of the
party was painted as Indians, nor, that I know of, disguised; though,"
(he adds a trifle casuistically) "some of them stopped at a paint-shop
on the way and daubed their faces with paint." Thereafter he is heard of
as a house-builder and contractor in Rhode Island; but at the news of
the battle of Lexington he abandoned his business and began the raising
and organizing of artillery companies. He was a first lieutenant in the
Rhode Island artillery, then in that of Massachusetts, and in 1776 was
transferred as captain to the regiment besieging Quebec. At Ticonderoga,
Stillwater and Saratoga he commanded a division of artillery, and it was
he who directed the operations leading to General Burgoyne's surrender.
For these feats he was specially commended by Generals Knox, Gates and
Schuyler, and in 1778 he was in command of the entire artillery service
of the northern department. Under Lafayette he took part in the
expedition which ended in the defeat of Lord Cornwallis; his skilful
manoeuvres are said to have broken the English blockade at Annapolis,
and when the English evacuated New York he was among the first to enter
the city.

The war over, he declined further military advancement and returned to
civil life. His services, however, were still frequently required, and
in 1812 he was put in command of the New York Brigade of artillery. One
of the forts built at this time for the defence of New York harbour was
called Fort Stevens, in his honour, and after the laying of the
foundation stone he "gave the party a dinner at his country seat, 'Mount
Buonaparte'," which he named after the hero who restored order in
France.

My great-grandfather next became an East-India merchant, and carried on
a large and successful trade with foreign ports. The United States War
Department still entrusted him with important private missions; he was a
confidential agent of both the French and English governments, and at
the same time took a leading part in the municipal business of New York,
and served on numerous commissions dealing with public affairs. He
divided his year between his New York house in Warren Street, and Mount
Buonaparte, the country place on Long Island created by the fortune he
had made as a merchant; but when his hero dropped the u from his name
and became Emperor, my scandalized great-grandfather, irrevocably
committed to the Republican idea, indignantly re-named his place "The
Mount." It stood, as its name suggests, on a terraced height in what is
now the dreary waste of Astoria, and my mother could remember the
stately colonnaded orangery, and the big orange-trees in tubs that were
set out every summer on the upper terrace. But in her day the classical
mantelpieces imported from Italy, with designs in white marble relieved
against red or green, had already been torn out and replaced by black
marble arches and ugly grates, and she recalled seeing the old
mantelpieces stacked away in the stables. In his Bonapartist days
General Stevens must have imported a good deal of Empire furniture from
Paris, and one relic, a pair of fine gilt andirons crowned with
Napoleonic eagles, has descended to his distant great-grand-daughter;
but much was doubtless discarded when the mantelpieces went, and the
stuffy day of Regency upholstery set in.

If I have dwelt too long on the career of this model citizen it is
because of a secret partiality for him--for his stern high-nosed good
looks, his gallantry in war, his love of luxury, his tireless commercial
activities. I like above all the abounding energy, the swift
adaptability and the joie de vivre which hurried him from one adventure
to another, with war, commerce and domesticity (he had two wives and
fourteen children) all carried on to the same heroic tune. But perhaps I
feel nearest to him when I look at my eagle andirons, and think of the
exquisite polychrome mantels that he found the time to bring all the way
from Italy, to keep company with the orange-trees on his terrace.

In his delightful book on Walter Scott Mr. John Buchan, excusing Scott's
inability to create a lifelike woman of his own class, says that, after
all, to the men of his generation, gentlewomen were "a toast" and little
else. Nothing could be truer. Child-bearing was their task, fine
needlework their recreation, being respected their privilege. Only in
aristocratic society, and in the most sophisticated capitals of Europe,
had they added to this repertory a good many private distractions. In
the upper middle class "the ladies, God bless 'em," sums it up. And so
it happens that I know less than nothing of the particular virtues,
gifts and modest accomplishments of the young women with pearls in their
looped hair or cambric ruffs round their slim necks, who prepared the
way for my generation. A few shreds of anecdote, no more than the faded
flowers between the leaves of a great-grandmother's Bible, are all that
remain to me.

Of my lovely great-grandmother Rhinelander (Mary Robart) I know only
that she was of French descent, as her spirited profile declares, and
properly jealous of her rights; for if she chanced to drive to New York
in her yellow coach with its fringed hammer-cloth at the same hour when
her daughter-in-law, from lower down the East River, was following the
same road, the latter's carriage had to take the old lady's dust all the
way, even though her horses were faster and her errand might be more
urgent. I may add that once, several years after my marriage, a new
coachman, who did not know my mother's carriage by sight, accidentally
drove me past it on the fashionable Ocean Drive at Newport, and that I
had to hasten the next morning to apologize to my mother, whose only
comment was, when I explained that the coachman could not have known the
offence he was committing: "You might have told him."

One of my great-grandmothers, Lucretia Ledyard (the second wife of
General Stevens), lost her "handsome sable cloak" one day when she was
driving out General Washington in her sleigh, while on another occasion,
when she was walking on the Battery in 1812, the gentleman who was with
her, glancing seaward, suddenly exclaimed: "My God, madam, there are the
British!"

Meagre relics of the past; and when it comes to the next generation,
that of my own grandparents, I am little better informed. My maternal
grandfather Rhinelander, son of the proud dame of the yellow coach,
married Mary Stevens, daughter of the General and his dusky handsome
Ledyard wife. The young pair had four children, and then my grandfather
died, when he was little more than thirty. He too was handsome, with
frank blue eyes and a wide intelligent brow. My mother said he "loved
reading," and that particular drop of his blood must have descended to
my veins, for I know of no other bookworm in the family. His young widow
and her children continued to live at the country place at Hell Gate,
lived there, in fact, from motives of economy, in winter as well as
summer while the children were young; for my grandmother, whose property
was left to the management of her husband's eldest brother, remained
poor though her brother-in-law grew rich. The children, however, were
carefully educated by English governesses and tutors; and to one of the
latter is owing a charming study of the view across Hell Gate to Long
Island, taken from my grandmother's lawn.

The little girls were taught needle-work, music, drawing and "the
languages" (their Italian teacher was professor Foresti, a distinguished
fugitive from the Austrian political prisons). In winter their "best
dresses" were low-necked and short-sleeved frocks, of pea-green merino,
with gray beaver hats trimmed with tartan ribbons, white cotton
stockings and heelless prunella slippers. When they walked in the snow
hand-knitted woollen stockings were drawn over this frail footgear, and
woollen shawls wrapped about their poor bare shoulders. They suffered,
like all young ladies of their day, from chilblains and excruciating
sick-headaches, yet all lived to a vigorous old age. When the eldest (my
mother) "came out," she wore a home-made gown of white tarlatan, looped
up with red and white camellias from the greenhouse, and her mother's
old white satin slippers; and her feet being of a different shape from
grandmamma's, she suffered martyrdom, and never ceased to resent the
indignity inflicted on her, and the impediment to her dancing, the more
so as her younger sisters, who were prettier and probably more indulged,
were given new slippers when their turn came. The girls appear to have
had their horses (in that almost roadless day Americans still went
everywhere in the saddle), and my mother, whose memory for the details
of dress was inexhaustible, told me that she wore a beaver hat with a
drooping ostrich plume, and a green veil to protect her complexion, and
that from motives of modesty riding-habits were cut to trail on the
ground, so that it was almost impossible to mount unassisted.

A little lower down the Sound (on the actual site of East Eighty-first
Street) stood my grandfather Jones's pretty country house with classic
pilasters and balustraded roof. A print in my possession shows a
low-studded log-cabin adjoining it under the elms, described as the
aboriginal Jones habitation; but it was more probably the slaves'
quarter. In this pleasant house lived a young man of twenty, handsome,
simple and kind, who was madly in love with Lucretia, the eldest of the
"poor Rhinelander" girls. George Frederic's parents thought him too
young to marry; perhaps they had other ambitions for him; they bade him
break off his attentions to Miss Rhinelander of Hell Gate. But George
Frederic was the owner of a rowing-boat. His stern papa, perhaps on
account of the proximity of the beloved, refused to give him a
sailing-craft, though every youth of the day had his "cat-boat," and the
smiling expanse of the Sound was flecked with the coming and going of
white wings. But George was not to be thwarted. He contrived to turn an
oar into a mast; he stole down before dawn, his bed-quilt under his arm,
rigged it to the oar in guise of a sail, and flying over the waters of
the Sound hurried to his lady's feet across the lawn depicted in the
tutor's painting. His devotion at last overcame the paternal opposition,
and George and "Lou" were married when they were respectively twenty-one
and nineteen. My grandfather was rich, and must have made his sons a
generous allowance; for the young couple, after an adventurous honeymoon
in Cuba (of which my father kept a conscientious record, full of drives
in volantes and visits to fashionable plantations) set up a house of
their own in Gramercy Park, then just within the built-on limits of New
York, and Mrs. George Frederic took her place among the most elegant
young married women of her day. At last the home-made tarlatans and the
inherited satin shoes were avenged, and there began a long career of
hospitality at home and travels abroad. My father, as a boy, had been to
Europe with his father on one of the last of the great sailing
passenger-ships; and he often told me of the delights of that crossing,
on a yacht-like vessel with few passengers and spacious airy cabins, as
compared with subsequent voyages on the cramped foul-smelling steamers
that superseded the sailing ships. A year or so after the birth of my
eldest brother my parents went abroad on a long tour. The new railways
were beginning to transform continental travel, and after driving by
diligence from Calais to Amiens my family journeyed thence by rail to
Paris. Later they took train from Paris to Brussels, a day or two after
the inauguration of this line; and my father notes in his diary: "We
were told to be at the station at one o'clock, AND BY FOUR WE WERE
ACTUALLY OFF." By various means of conveyance the young couple with
their infant son pursued their way through France, Belgium, Germany and
Italy. They met other young New Yorkers of fashion, also on their
travels, and would have had a merry time of it had not little Freddy's
youthful ailments so frequently altered their plans--sometimes to a
degree so disturbing that the patient young father (of twenty-three)
confides to his diary how "awful a thing it is to travel in Europe with
an infant of twenty months."

In spite of Freddy they saw many cities and countries, and on February
24, 1848, toward the hour of noon, incidentally witnessed, from the
balcony of their hotel in the rue de Rivoli, the flight of Louis
Philippe and Queen Marie Amelie across the Tuileries gardens. Though my
mother often described this scene to me, I suspect that the study of the
Paris fashions made a more vivid impression on her than the fall of
monarchies. The humiliation of the pea-green merino and the maternal
slippers led to a good many extravagances; among them there is the white
satin bonnet trimmed with white marabout and crystal drops in which the
bride made her wedding visits, and a "capeline" of gorge de pigeon
taffetas with a wreath of flowers in shiny brown kid, which was one of
the triumphs of her Paris shopping. She had a beautiful carriage, and
her sloping shoulders and slim waist were becomingly set off by the
wonderful gowns brought home from that first visit to the capital of
fashion. All this happened years before I was born; but the tradition of
elegance was never abandoned, and when we finally returned to live in
New York (in 1872) I shared the excitement caused by the annual arrival
of the "trunk from Paris," and the enchantment of seeing one resplendent
dress after another shaken out of its tissue-paper. Once, when I was a
small child, my mother's younger sister, my beautiful and serious-minded
Aunt Mary Newbold, asked me, with edifying interest: "What would you
like to be when you grow up?" and on my replying in all good faith, and
with a dutiful air: "The best dressed woman in New York," she uttered
the horrified cry: "Oh, don't say that, darling!" to which I could only
rejoin in wonder: "But, auntie, you know Mamma IS."

When my grandfather died my father came into an independent fortune; but
even before that my father and uncles seem to have had allowances
permitting them to lead a life of leisure and amiable hospitality. The
customs of the day were simple, and in my father's set the chief
diversions were sea-fishing, boat-racing and wild-fowl shooting. There
were no clubs as yet in New York, and my mother, whose view of life was
incurably prosaic, always said that this accounted for the early
marriages, as the young men of that day "had nowhere else to go." The
young married couples, Langdons, Hones, Newbolds, Edgars, Joneses,
Gallatins, etc., entertained each other a good deal, and my mother's
sloping shoulders were often displayed above the elegant fringed and
ruffled "berthas" of her Parisian dinner gowns. The amusing diary of Mr.
Philip Hone gives a good idea of the simple but incessant exchange of
hospitality between the young people who ruled New York society before
the Civil War.

My readers, by this time, may be wondering what were the particular
merits, private or civic, of these amiable persons. Their lives, as one
looks back, certainly seem lacking in relief; but I believe their value
lay in upholding two standards of importance in any community, that of
education and good manners, and of scrupulous probity in business and
private affairs. New York has always been a commercial community, and in
my infancy the merits and defects of its citizens were those of a
mercantile middle class. The first duty of such a class was to maintain
a strict standard of uprightness in affairs; and the gentlemen of my
father's day did maintain it, whether in the law, in banking, shipping
or wholesale commercial enterprises. I well remember the horror excited
by any irregularity in affairs, and the relentless social ostracism
inflicted on the families of those who lapsed from professional or
business integrity. In one case, where two or three men of high social
standing were involved in a discreditable bank failure, their families
were made to suffer to a degree that would seem merciless to our modern
judgment. But perhaps the New Yorkers of that day were unconsciously
trying to atone for their culpable neglect of state and national
politics, from which they had long disdainfully held aloof, by upholding
the sternest principles of business probity, and inflicting the severest
social penalties on whoever lapsed from them. At any rate I should say
that the qualities justifying the existence of our old society were
social amenity and financial incorruptibility; and we have travelled far
enough from both to begin to estimate their value.

The weakness of the social structure of my parents' day was a blind
dread of innovation, an instinctive shrinking from responsibility. In
1824 (or thereabouts) a group of New York gentlemen who were appointed
to examine various plans for the proposed laying-out of the city, and
whose private sympathies were notoriously anti-Jeffersonian and
undemocratic, decided against reproducing the beautiful system of
squares circles and radiating avenues which Major L'Enfant, the
brilliant French engineer, had designed for Washington, because it was
thought "undemocratic" for citizens of the new republic to own
building-plots which were not all of exactly the same shape, size--and
VALUE! This naif document, shown to me by Robert Minturn, a descendant
of a member of the original committee, and doubtless often since
published, typified the prudent attitude of a society of prosperous
business men who have no desire to row against the current.

A little world so well-ordered and well-to-do does not often produce
either eagles or fanatics, and both seem to have been conspicuously
absent from the circle in which my forebears moved. In old-established
and powerful societies originality of character is smiled at, and even
encouraged to assert itself; but conformity is the bane of middle-class
communities, and as far as I can recall, only two of my relations
stepped out of the strait path of the usual. One was a mild and
inoffensive old bachelor cousin, very small and frail, and reputed of
immense wealth and morbid miserliness, who built himself a fine house in
his youth, and lived in it for fifty or sixty years, in a state of
negativeness and insignificance which made him proverbial even in our
conforming class--and then, in his last years (so we children were told)
SAT ON A MARBLE SHELF, AND THOUGHT HE WAS A BUST OF NAPOLEON.

Cousin Edmund's final illusion was not without pathos, but as a source
of inspiration to my childish fancy he was a poor thing compared with
George Alfred. George Alfred was another cousin, but one whom I had
never seen, and could never hope to see, because years before he
had--vanished. Vanished, that is, out of society, out of respectability,
out of the safe daylight world of "nice people" and reputable doings.
Before naming George Alfred my mother altered her expression and lowered
her voice. Thank heaven SHE was not responsible for him--he belonged to
my father's side of the family! But they too had long since washed their
hands of George Alfred--and ceased even to be aware of his existence. If
my mother pronounced his name it was solely, I believe, out of malice,
out of the child's naughty desire to evoke some nursery hobgoblin by
muttering a dark incantation like "Eena Meena Mina Mo," and then darting
away with affrighted backward looks to see if there is anything there.

My mother always darted away from George Alfred's name after pronouncing
it, and it was not until I was grown up, and had acquired greater
courage and persistency, that one day I drove her to the wall by
suddenly asking: "But, mamma, WHAT DID HE DO?" "Some woman"--my mother
muttered; and no one accustomed to the innocuous word as now used can
imagine the shades of disapproval, scorn and yet excited curiosity, that
"some" could then connote on the lips of virtue.

George Alfred--and some woman! Who was she? From what heights had she
fallen with him, to what depths dragged him down? For in those simple
days it was always a case of "the woman tempted me." To her respectable
sisters her culpability was as certain in advance as Predestination to
the Calvinist. But I was not fated to know more--thank heaven I was not!
For our shadowy Paolo and Francesca, circling together on the "accursed
air," somewhere outside the safe boundaries of our old New York, gave
me, I verily believe, my earliest glimpse of the poetry that Goethe
missed in the respectable world of the Hirschgraben, and that my
ancestors assuredly failed to find, or to create, between the Battery
and Union Square. The vision of poor featureless unknown Alfred and his
siren, lurking in some cranny of my imagination, hinted at regions
perilous, dark and yet lit with mysterious fires, just outside the world
of copybook axioms, and the old obediences that were in my blood; and
the hint was useful--for a novelist.


CHAPTER 2. KNEE-HIGH.

2.1.

Peopling the background of these earliest scenes there were the tall
splendid father who was always so kind, and whose strong arms lifted one
so high, and held one so safely; and my mother, who wore such beautiful
flounced dresses, and had painted and carved fans in sandalwood boxes,
and ermine scarves, and perfumed yellowish laces pinned up in blue
paper, and kept in a marquetry chiffonier, and all the other dim
impersonal attributes of a Mother, without, as yet, anything much more
definite; and two big brothers who were mostly away (the eldest already
at college); but in the foreground with Foxy there was one rich
all-permeating presence: Doyley. How I pity all children who have not
had a Doyley--a nurse who has always been there, who is as established
as the sky and as warm as the sun, who understands everything, feels
everything, can arrange everything, and combines all the powers of the
Divinity with the compassion of a mortal heart like one's own! Doyley's
presence was the warm cocoon in which my infancy lived safe and
sheltered; the atmosphere without which I could not have breathed. It is
thanks to Doyley that not one bitter memory, one uncomprehended
injustice, darkened the days when the soul's flesh is so tender, and the
remembrance of wrongs so acute.

I was born in New York, in my parents' house in West Twenty-third
Street, and we lived there in winter, and (I suppose) at Newport in
summer, during the first three years of my life. But no memories of
those years survive, save those I have mentioned, and one other, a good
deal dimmer, of going to stay one summer with my Aunt Elizabeth, my
father's unmarried sister, who had a house at Rhinebeck-on-the-Hudson.
This aunt, whom I remember as a ramrod-backed old lady compounded of
steel and granite, had been threatened in her youth with the
"consumption" which had already carried off a brother and sister. Few
families in that day escaped the scourge of tuberculosis, and the
Protestant cemeteries of Pisa and Rome are full of the graves of
wretched exiles sent to end their days by the supposedly mild shores of
Arno or Tiber. My poor Aunt Margaret, my poor Uncle Joshua, both
snatched in their early flower, already slept beside the Pyramid of
Caius Cestius, where my grandmother was later to join them; and when
Elizabeth in her turn began to pine, her parents, no doubt discouraged
by the Italian experiment, decided to try curing her at home. They
therefore shut her up one October in her bedroom in the New York house
in Mercer Street, lit the fire, sealed up the windows, and did not let
her out again till the following June, when she emerged in perfect
health, to live till seventy.

My aunt's house, called Rhinecliff, afterward became a vivid picture in
the gallery of my little girlhood; but among those earliest impressions
only one is connected with it; that of a night when, as I was ready to
affirm, there was a Wolf under my bed. This business of the Wolf was the
first of other similar terrifying experiences, and since most
imaginative children know these hauntings by tribal animals, I mention
it only because from the moment of that adventure it became necessary,
whenever I "read" the story of Red Riding Hood (that is, looked at the
pictures), to carry my little nursery stool from one room to another, in
pursuit of Doyley or my mother, so that I should never again be exposed
to meeting the family Totem when I sat down alone to my book.

The effect of terror produced by the house of Rhinecliff was no doubt
partly due to what seemed to me its intolerable ugliness. My visual
sensibility must always have been too keen for middling pleasures; my
photographic memory of rooms and houses--even those seen but briefly, or
at long intervals--was from my earliest years a source of inarticulate
misery, for I was always vaguely frightened by ugliness. I can still
remember hating everything at Rhinecliff, which, as I saw, on
rediscovering it some years later, was an expensive but dour specimen of
Hudson River Gothic; and from the first I was obscurely conscious of a
queer resemblance between the granitic exterior of Aunt Elizabeth and
her grimly comfortable home, between her battlemented caps and the
turrets of Rhinecliff. But all this is merged in a blur, for by the time
I was four years old I was playing in the Roman Forum instead of on the
lawns of Rhinecliff.

2.2.

The transition woke no surprise, for almost everything that constituted
my world was still about me: my handsome father, my beautifully dressed
mother, and the warmth and sunshine that were Doyley. The chief
difference was that the things about me were now not ugly but incredibly
beautiful. That old Rome of the mid-nineteenth century was still the
city of romantic ruins in which Clive Newcome's "J. J." had depicted the
Trasteverina dancing before a locanda to the music of a pifferaro. I
remember, through the trailing clouds of infancy, the steps of the
Piazza di Spagna thronged with Thackerayan artists' models, and heaped
with early violets, daffodils and tulips; I remember long sunlit
wanderings on the springy turf of great Roman villas; heavy coaches of
Cardinals flashing in scarlet and gold through the twilight of narrow
streets; the flowery bombardment of the Carnival procession watched with
shrieks of infant ecstasy from a balcony of the Corso. But the liveliest
hours were those spent with my nurse on the Monte Pincio, where I played
with Marion Crawford's little half-sister, Daisy Terry, and her brother
Arthur. Other children, long since dim and nameless, flit by as
supernumeraries of the band; but only Daisy and her brother have
remained alive to me. There we played, dodging in and out among old
stone benches, racing, rolling hoops, whirling through skipping ropes,
or pausing out of breath to watch the toy procession of stately
barouches and glossy saddle-horses which, on every fine afternoon of
winter, carried the flower of Roman beauty and nobility round and round
and round the restricted meanderings of the hill-top.

Those hours were the jolliest; yet deeper impressions were gathered in
walks with my mother on the daisy-strewn lawns of the Villa
Doria-Pamphili, among the statues and stone-pines of the Villa Borghese,
or hunting on the slopes of the Palatine for the mysterious bits of blue
and green and rosy stone which cropped up through the turf as violets
and anemones did in other places, and turned out to be precious
fragments of porphyry, lapis lazuli, verde antico, and all the mineral
flora of Palace of the Caesars. In those days every traveller of
artistic sensibility gathered baskets-full of these marble blossoms, and
had them transformed into the paper-weights, inkstands and circular
"sofa-tables" without which no gentleman's home was complete. All the
glory seemed to forsake my treasures when they were forced into these
lapidary combinations; but the hunt was thrilling, and it occurred to no
one that these exquisite relics of ruined opus alexandrinum, and of
Imperial vases and statues, should have been treated with more
reverence. The buffaloes of Piranesi had vanished from the Forum and the
Palatine, but the ruins of Imperial Rome were still a free
stamping-ground for the human herd.

There were other days when we drove out on the Campagna, and wandered
over the short grass between the tombs of the Appian way; still others
among the fountains of Frascati; and some, particularly vivid, when, in
the million-tapered blaze of St Peter's, the Pope floated ethereally
above a long train of ecclesiastics seen through an incense haze so
golden that it seemed to pour from the blinding luminary behind the High
Altar.

What clung closest in after years, when I thought of the lost Rome of my
infancy? It is hard to say; perhaps simply the warm scent of the box
hedges on the Pincian, and the texture of weather-worn sun-gilt stone.
Those, at least, are the two impressions which, for many years after,
the mightiest of names instantly conjured up for me.

2.3.

My Roman impressions are followed by others, improbably picturesque, of
a journey to Spain. It must have taken place just before or after the
Roman year; I remember that the Spanish tour was still considered an
arduous adventure, and to attempt it with a young child the merest
folly. But my father had been reading Prescott and Washington Irving;
the Alhambra was more of a novelty than the Colosseum; and as the
offspring of born travellers I was expected, even in infancy, to know
how to travel. I suppose I acquitted myself better than the unhappy
Freddy; for from that wild early pilgrimage I brought back an incurable
passion for the road. What a journey it must have been! Presumably there
was already a railway from the frontier to Madrid; but I recall only the
incessant jingle of diligence bells, the cracking of whips, the yells of
gaunt muleteers hurling stones at their gaunter mules to urge them up
interminable and almost unscaleable hills. It is all a jumble of excited
impressions: breaking down on wind-swept sierras; arriving late and
hungry at squalid posadas; flea-hunting, chocolate-drinking (I believe
there was nothing but chocolate and olives to feed me on), being pursued
wherever we went by touts, guides, deformed beggars, and all sorts of
jabbering and confusing people; and, through the chaos and fatigue, a
fantastic vision of the columns of Cordova, the tower of the Giralda,
the pools and fountains of the Alhambra, the orange groves of Seville,
the awful icy penumbra of the Escorial, and everywhere shadowy aisles
undulating with incense and processions...Perhaps, after all, it is not
a bad thing to begin one's travels at four.

2.4.

In the course of time we exchanged the Piazza di Spagna for the Champs
Elysees. It probably happened the very next winter; but life in Paris
must have seemed colourless after the sunny violet-scented Italian days,
for I remember far less of it than of Rome.

Two episodes, however, stand out vividly. One was the coming to dine
every Sunday evening of a kindly gentleman with curly gray hair and a
long moustache. An old friend and Rhode Island neighbour of the family.
This was Mr. Henry Bedlow, whose chief title to fame seems to have been
that he lived in an old house "up the island" called Malbone, which he
had inherited from his grandfather or great-uncle, the celebrated
miniature painter of that name. When Mr. Bedlow dined with us I was
always led in with the dessert, my red hair rolled into sausages, and
the sleeves of my best frock looped up with pink coral, and was allowed
to perch on his knee while he "told me mythology." What blessings I have
since called down on the teller! Fairy stories, even Mother Goose, even
Andersen's tales and the Contes de Perrault, still left me inattentive
and indifferent, but the domestic dramas of the Olympians roused all my
creative energy. Perhaps I scented an indefinable condescension (and
often a great lack of discernment) in the stories which big people have
invented about little ones; and besides, the doings of children were
always intrinsically less interesting to me than those of grown-ups, and
I felt more at home with the gods and goddesses of Olympus, who behaved
so much like the ladies and gentlemen who came to dine, whom I saw
riding and driving in the Bois de Boulogne, and about whom I was forever
weaving stories of my own.

The other Parisian event concerns this story-telling. The imagining of
tales (about grown up people, "real people," I called them--children
always seemed to me incompletely realized) had gone on in me since my
first conscious moments; I cannot remember the time when I did not want
to "make up" stories. But it was in Paris that I found the necessary
formula. Oddly enough, I had no desire to write my stories down (even
had I known how to write, and I couldn't yet form a letter); but from
the first I had to have a book in my hand to "make up" with, and from
the first it had to be a certain sort of book. The page had to be
closely printed, with rather heavy black type, and not much margin.
Certain densely printed novels in the early Tauchnitz editions, Harrison
Ainsworth's for instance, would have been my richest sources of
inspiration had I not hit one day on something even better: Washington
Irving's "Alhambra." These shaggy volumes, printed in close black
characters on rough-edged yellowish pages, and bound in coarse dark-blue
covers (probably a production of the old Gaglignani Press in Paris) must
have been a relic of our Spanish adventure. Washington Irving was an old
friend of my family's, and his collected works, in comely type and
handsome binding, adorned our library shelves at home. But these would
not have been of much use to me as a source of inspiration. The rude
companion of our travels was the book I needed; I had only to open it
for the Pierian fount to flow. There was richness and mystery in the
thick black type, a hint of bursting overflowing material in the serried
lines and scant margin. To this day I am bored by the sight of widely
spaced type, and a little islet of text in a sailless sea of white
paper.

Well--the "Alhambra" once in hand, making up was ecstasy. At any moment
the impulse might seize me; and then, if the book was in reach, I had
only to walk the floor, turning the pages as I walked, to be swept off
full sail on the sea of dreams. The fact that I could not read added to
the completeness of the illusion, for from those mysterious blank pages
I could evoke whatever my fancy chose. Parents and nurses, peeping at me
through the cracks of doors (I always had to be alone to "make up"),
noticed that I often held the book upside down, but that I never failed
to turn the pages, and that I turned them at about the right pace for a
person reading aloud as passionately and precipitately as was my habit.

There was something almost ritualistic in the performance. The call came
regularly and imperiously; and though, when it caught me at inconvenient
moments, I would struggle against it conscientiously--for I was
beginning to be a very conscientious little girl--the struggle was
always a losing one. I had to obey the furious Muse; and there are
deplorable tales of my abandoning the "nice" playmates who had been
invited to "spend the day," and rushing to my mother with the desperate
cry: "Mamma, you must go and entertain that little girl for me. I'VE GOT
TO MAKE UP."

My parents, distressed by my solitude (my two brothers being by this
time grown up and away) were always trying to establish relations for me
with "nice" children, and I was willing enough to play in the Champs
Elysees with such specimens as were produced or (more reluctantly) to
meet them at little parties or dancing classes; but I did not want them
to intrude on my privacy, and there was not one I would not have
renounced forever rather than have my "making up" interfered with. What
I really preferred was to be alone with Washington Irving and my dream.

The peculiar purpose for which books served me probably made me
indifferent to what was in them. At any rate, I can remember feeling no
curiosity about it. But my father, by dint of patience, managed to drum
the alphabet into me; and one day I was found sitting under a table,
absorbed in a volume which I did not appear to be using for
improvisation. My immobility attracted attention, and when asked what I
was doing, I replied: "Reading." This was received with incredulity; but
on being called upon to read a few lines aloud I appear to have
responded to the challenge, and it was then discovered that the work
over which I was poring was a play by Ludovic Halevy, called "Fanny
Lear," which was having a succes de scandale in Paris owing to the fact
that the heroine was what ladies of my mother's day called "one of those
women." Thereafter the books I used for "making up" were carefully
inspected before being entrusted to me; and an arduous business it must
have been, for no book ever came my way without being instantly pounced
on, and now that I could read I divided my time between my own
improvisations and the printed inventions of others.

It was in Paris that I took my first dancing-lessons. I was no Isadora,
and these beginnings would not be worth a word but for the light they
throw on the manners and customs of my infancy. I used to go, with a
group of little friends, children English and American, to the private
cours of an ex-ballerina of the Grand Opera, Mademoiselle Michelet, a
large stern woman with a heavy black moustache, in whom it would have
been hard for the most imaginative to detect even a trace of her early
calling. To us she was the severest of instructresses. The waltz and
mazurka had long since been introduced into the ball-room, without even
a lingering remembrance of Byron's reprobation; but they were not
thought difficult enough to train the young, and we were persistently
exercised in the menuet, the shawl dance (with a lace scarf) and the
cachucha--of course with castanets. Mademoiselle Michelet's quarters
were very small; and I can still see myself, an isolated figure in the
centre of her shining parquet, helplessly waving my scarf or uncertainly
clacking my castanets, while my fellow pupils hedged me about as rather
bored spectators, and Mademoiselle Michelet's wizened little old mother,
in a cap turreted with loops of purple ribbon, tinkled out the tunes at
a piano squeezed into a corner of the room.

During one of our Paris winters (I think there were two or three) my
dear old grandmother, my mother's mother, paid us a long visit. I call
her "old," though it is probable that at the time she was under sixty;
but I had never seen her except in lace cap and lappets, a bunch of gold
charms dangling from her massive watch-chain, among the folds of a rich
black silk dress, and a black japanned ear-trumpet at her ear--the
abstract type of an ancestress as the function was then understood.

I always recall her seated in an arm-chair, her undimmed eyes bent over
some exquisitely fine needle-work. I hope she sometimes went for a walk
or a drive, and enjoyed a few glimpses of grown-up society; but for me
she exists only as a motionless and gently smiling figure, whose one
gesture was to lay aside her stitching for her ear-trumpet at my
approach. When she was with us I was constantly in her room; and my way
of returning her affection was to read aloud to her. I had just
discovered a volume of Tennyson among my father's books, and for hours I
used to shout the "Idyls of the King," and "The Lord of Burleigh"
through the trumpet of my long-suffering ancestress. Not being more than
six or seven years old I understood hardly anything of what I was
reading, or rather I understood it in my own way, which was most often
not the poet's; as in the line from "The Lord of Burleigh," "and he made
a loving consort," where I read "concert" for consort, and concluded
(being already addicted to rash generalisations) that a gentleman's
first act after marriage was to give his spouse a concert, in gratitude
for which "a faithful wife was she." But I enjoyed all the sonorities as
much as if I had known what they meant, and perhaps even more, since my
own interpretations so often enriched the text; and probably such shrill
scraps as travelled through the windings of my grandmother's trumpet
troubled her no more than they did me. To one whose preferred poetic
reading was "The Christian Year," the "Idyls of the King" must have been
almost as full of mystery and obscurity as Browning was to the next
generation, and the rhythmic raptures tingling through me probably woke
no echo in the dear old head bent to mine.

I suspect that no one else in the house could bear to be read aloud to
by me, for I do not remember attempting it on any one but my
grandmother; and indeed poetry did not play much part in our lives. My
father knew Macaulay's "Lays" by heart, and

Ho, Philip, send for charity thy Mexican pistoles,

and

Where ride Massilia's triremes
Heavy with fair-haired slaves,

had already thrummed their march-tunes into my infant ears. The new
Tennysonian rhythms also moved my father greatly; and I imagine there
was a time when his rather rudimentary love of verse might have been
developed had he had any one with whom to share it. But my mother's
matter-of-factness must have shrivelled up any such buds of fancy; and
in later years I remember his reading only Macaulay, Prescott,
Washington Irving, and every book of travel he could find. Arctic
explorations especially absorbed him, and I have wondered since what
stifled cravings had once germinated in him, and what manner of man he
was really meant to be. That he was a lonely one, haunted by something
always unexpressed and unattained, I am sure.

2.5.

I remember nothing else of my Paris life except one vision over which
after-events shed a tragic glare. It was the sight, one autumn
afternoon, of a beautiful lady driving down the Champs Elysees in a
beautiful open carriage, a little boy in uniform beside her on a pony,
and a glittering escort of officers. The carriage, of the kind called a
daumont, was preceded by outriders, and swayed gracefully on its big
C-springs to the rhythm of four high-stepping and highly-groomed horses,
a postilion on one of the leaders, and two tremendous footmen perched
high at the back. But all I had eyes for was the lady herself. Leaning
back as ladies of those days leaned in their indolently-hung carriages,
flounces of feuille-morte taffetas billowing out about her, and on her
rich auburn hair a tiny black lace bonnet with a tea-rose above one ear.
I still see her serene elegance of attitude and expression, her
conscious air of being, with her little boy, and the shining horses, and
the flashing officers and outriders, the centre of the sumptuous
spectacle. The next year she and her procession had vanished in a
crimson hurricane; and the whole setting of swaying carriages and
outstretched ladies, of young men caracoling on thorough-breds past
stately houses glimpsed through clustering horse-chestnut foliage, has
long since been rolled up in the lumber-room of discarded pageants.

We must have remained in Paris till the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian
war, at which fateful moment we chanced to be at Bad Wildbad, in the
Black Forest, a primitive watering-place just coming into fashion, where
my mother had been sent for a cure. With a young German nursery
governess who had been added to our party I took happy rambles in the
pine-forests, and learned from her to make wild-flower garlands, to knit
and to tat, and to practise (for the only time in my life) other
Gretchenish arts. She also taught me (out of the New Testament) how to
read German; and in our Bible reading I came across a phrase which has
always delighted me because of the quaint contrast between its impulsive
German Gemuthlichkeit and the majestic phraseology of our Authorized
Version. When, on the Mount of Transfiguration, the disciples cry out:
"Lord, it is good for us to be here; if Thou wilt, let us make here
three tabernacles," the German version causes them to say: "So lasset
uns Hutten bauen!" The cry, which suggested to me something fresh and
leafy and adventurous, like a Mayne Reid story or "The Swiss Family
Robinson," is a picturesque instance of the way in which racial
character colours alien formulas.

But one morning, climbing a woodland path with my governess and some
other children, I was seized by an agony of pain--and after that for
many long weeks life was a confused and feverish misery. I was
desperately ill with typhoid fever, and I mention the fact only because
of one incredible circumstance. All the doctors of Wildbad (they were
doubtless few) had already been mobilized, save one super-annuated
practitioner; and he had never before seen a case of typhoid! His son,
also a doctor, was with the army; and all that his father could do was
to despatch bulletins to him, asking how I was to be treated. The
replies, one may suppose, were long in arriving; and in the interval
death came near. But at the same time a celebrated Russian physician
arrived at Wildbad for a day, at the call of a princely patient. My
parents persuaded him to see me, and he prescribed the new treatment:
plunging the patient in baths of ice-cold water. At the suggestion my
mother's courage failed her; but she wrapped me in wet sheets, and I was
saved.

2.6.

My childish world, though so well filled, lacked completeness, for my
dog Foxy had not come to Europe with us. His absence left such a void
that my parents finally gave me a Florentine lupetto, as white as Foxy,
but much smaller. By that time (I think in 1870) we had exchanged Paris
for Florence, and he was known as Florence Foxy. He was the joyous
companion of a comparatively dull winter; for the return to Italy did
not bring back the joys of Rome. Florence was much colder and less
sunny; there were no children to replace the jolly Pincianites, and the
Cascine Gardens are associated only with sedate walks with my elders,
monotonous enough if I had not had Foxy to race with, and violets to
gather.

The other high lights of those gray months were the increased
enchantment of "making up," and the fainter glow of the hours spent with
a charming young lady who taught me Italian. My lessons amused me, and
the new language came to me as naturally as breathing, as French and
German had already. Why do so few parents know what a fortune they could
bestow on their children by teaching them the modern languages in
babyhood, when a playmate is the only professor needed, and the speech
acquired is never afterward lost, however deep below the surface it may
be embedded?

But discovering Italian, though it was to be the source of such joys,
was nothing to the ecstasy of "making up." Learning to read, instead of
distracting me from this passion, had only fed it; and during that
Florentine winter it became a frenzy. Our vast and cheerless suite in
the high-ceilinged piano nobile of an hotel overlooking the Arno was
scantily furnished with threadbare carpets and heavy consoles and sofas;
but the long vista of rooms, each communicating with the next through
tall folding doors, was a matchless track for my sport. When the
grown-ups were out, and Doyley safe with her sewing, I had the field to
myself; and I still feel the rapture (greater than any I have ever known
in writing) of pouring forth undisturbed the tireless torrent of my
stories. The "Faster, faster, O Circe, Goddess" of "The Strayed
Reveller" always reminds me of those youthful gallops around the
racecourse of my imagination. The speed at which I travelled was so
great that my mother tried in vain to take down my "stories," and
posterity will never know what it has lost! All I remember is that my
tales were about what I still thought of as "real people" (that is,
grown-up people, resembling in appearance and habits my family and their
friends, and caught in the same daily coil of "things that might have
happened"). My imagination was still closed to the appeal of the purely
fabulous and fairy-like, and though I was already an ardent reader of
poetry I felt no desire to write it. But all that was soon to be
changed; for the next year we were to go home to New York, and I was to
enter into the kingdom of my father's library.


CHAPTER 3. LITTLE GIRL.

3.1.

The depreciation of American currency at the close of the Civil war had
so much reduced my father's income that, in common with many of his
friends and relations, he had gone to Europe to economize, letting his
town and country houses for six years to some of the profiteers of the
day; but I did not learn till much later to how prosaic a cause I owed
my early years in Europe. Happy misfortune, which gave me, for the rest
of my life, that background of beauty and old-established order! I did
not know how deeply I had felt the nobility and harmony of the great
European cities till our steamer was docked at New York.

I remember once asking an old New Yorker why he never went abroad, and
his answering: "Because I can't bear to cross Murray Street." It was
indeed an unsavoury experience, and the shameless squalor of the
purlieus of the New York docks in the 'seventies dismayed my childish
eyes, stored with the glories of Rome and the architectural majesty of
Paris. But it was summer; we were soon at Newport, under the friendly
gables of Pencraig; and to a little girl long pent up in hotels and
flats there was inexhaustible delight in the freedom of a staircase to
run up and down, of lawns and trees, a meadow full of clover and
daisies, a pony to ride, terriers to romp with, a sheltered cove to
bathe in, flower-beds spicy with "carnation, lily, rose," and a
kitchen-garden crimson with strawberries and sweet as honey with Seckel
pears.

The roomy and pleasant house of Pencraig was surrounded by a verandah
wreathed in clematis and honey-suckle, and below it a lawn sloped to a
deep daisied meadow, beyond which were a private bathing-beach and
boat-landing. From the landing we used to fish for "scuppers" and
"porgies," succulent little fish that were grilled or fried for high
tea; and off the rocky point lay my father's and brothers' cat-boats,
the graceful wide-sailed craft that flecked the bay like sea-gulls.

Adjoining our property was Edgerston, the country home of Lewis
Rutherfurd, the distinguished astronomer, notable in his day for his
remarkable photographs of the moon. He and his wife were lifelong
friends of my parents', and in their household, besides two grown-up
daughters of singular beauty, there were two little boys, the youngest
of my own age. There were also two young governesses, French and German;
and as I was alone, and the German governess who had been imported for
me was unsympathetic and unsatisfied, she was soon sent home, and the
Rutherfurd governesses (the daughters of the house being "out," and off
their hands) took me on for French, German, and whatever else, in those
ancient days, composed a little girl's curriculum. This drew the two
households still closer, for though I did not study with the little boys
I seem to remember that I went to Edgerston for my lessons. There was
certainly a continual coming and going through the private gate between
the properties; but I recall a good deal more of our games than of my
lessons.

Most vivid is my memory of the picturesque archery club meetings of
which the grown daughters of the house, Margaret (afterward Mrs. Henry
White) and her sister Louisa were among the most brilliant performers.
When the club met we children were allowed to be present, and to
circulate among the grown-ups (usually all three of us astride of one
patient donkey); and a pretty sight the meeting was, with parents and
elders seated in a semicircle on the turf behind the lovely archeresses
in floating silks or muslins, with their wide leghorn hats, and heavy
veils flung back only at the moment of aiming. These veils are
associated with all the summer festivities of my childhood. In that
simple society there was an almost pagan worship of physical beauty, and
the first question asked about any youthful newcomer on the social scene
was invariably: "Is she pretty?" or: "Is he handsome?"--for good looks
were as much prized in young men as in maidens. For the latter no grace
was rated as high as "a complexion." It is hard to picture nowadays the
shell-like transparence, the luminous red-and-white, of those young
cheeks untouched by paint or powder, in which the blood came and went
like the lights of an aurora. Beauty was unthinkable without "a
complexion," and to defend that treasure against sun and wind, and the
arch-enemy sea air, veils as thick as curtains (some actually of woollen
barege) were habitually worn. It must have been very uncomfortable for
the wearers, who could hardly see or breathe; but even to my childish
eyes the effect was dazzling when the curtain was drawn, and young
beauty shone forth. My dear friend Howard Sturgis used to laugh at the
"heavily veiled" heroines who lingered on so late in Victorian fiction,
and were supposed to preserve their incognito until they threw back
their veils; but if he had known fashionable Newport in my infancy he
would have seen that the novelists' formula was based on what was once a
reality.

Those archery meetings greatly heightened my infantile desire to "tell a
story," and the young gods and goddesses I used to watch strolling
across the Edgerston lawn were the prototypes of my first novels. The
spectacle was a charming one to an imaginative child already caught in
the toils of romance; no wonder I remember it better than my studies.
Not that I was not eager to learn; but my long and weary illness had
made my parents unduly anxious about my health, and they forbade my
being taught anything that required a mental effort. Committing to
memory, and preparing lessons in advance, were ruled out; it was thought
that I read too much (as if a born reader could!), and that my mind must
be spared all "strain." This was doubtless partly due to the solicitude
of parents for a late-born child, partly to a natural reaction against
the severities of their own early training. The sentimental theory that
children must not be made to study anything that does not interest them
was already in the air, and reinforced by the fear of "fatiguing" my
brain, it made my parents turn my work into play. Being deprived of the
irreplaceable grounding of Greek and Latin, I never learned to
concentrate except on subjects naturally interesting to me, and
developed a restless curiosity which prevented my fixing my thoughts for
long even on these. Of benefits I see only one. To most of my
contemporaries the enforced committing to memory of famous poems must
have forever robbed some of the loveliest of their bloom; but this being
forbidden me, great poetry--English, French, German and Italian--came to
me fresh as the morning, with the dew on it, and has never lost that
early glow.

The drawbacks were far greater than this advantage. But for the wisdom
of Fraulein Bahlmann, my beloved German teacher, who saw which way my
fancy turned, and fed it with all the wealth of German literature, from
the Minnesingers to Heine--but for this, and the leave to range in my
father's library, my mind would have starved at the age when the mental
muscles are most in need of feeding.

I used to say that I had been taught only two things in my childhood:
the modern languages and good manners. Now that I have lived to see both
these branches of culture dispensed with, I perceive that there are
worse systems of education. But in justice to my parents I ought to have
named a third element in my training; a reverence for the English
language as spoken according to the best usage. Usage, in my childhood,
was as authoritative an element in speaking English as tradition was in
social conduct. And it was because our little society still lived in the
reflected light of a long-established culture that my parents, who were
far from intellectual, who read little and studied not at all,
nevertheless spoke their mother tongue with scrupulous perfection, and
insisted that their children should do the same.

This reverence for the best tradition of spoken English--an easy
idiomatic English, neither pedantic nor "literary"--was no doubt partly
due to the fact that, in the old New York families of my parents' day,
the children's teachers were often English. My mother and her sisters
and brother had English tutors and governesses, and my own brothers were
educated at home by an extremely cultivated English tutor. In my
mother's family, more than one member of the generation preceding hers
had been educated at Oxford or Cambridge, and one of my own brothers
went to Cambridge.

Even so, however, I have never quite understood how two people so little
preoccupied with letters as my father and mother had such sensitive ears
for pure English. The example they set me was never forgotten; I still
wince under my mother's ironic smile when I said that some visitor had
stayed "quite a while," and her dry: "Where did you pick THAT up?" the
wholesome derision of my grown-up brothers saved me from pomposity as my
mother's smile guarded me against slovenliness; I still tingle with the
sting of their ridicule when, excusing myself for having forgotten
something I had been told to do, I said, with an assumption of grown-up
dignity (aetat ten or eleven): "I didn't know that it was IMPERATIVE."

Such elementary problems as (judging from the letters I receive from
unknown readers) disturb present-day users of English in
America--perplexity as to the distinction between "should" and "would,"
and the display of such half-educated pedantry as saying "gotten" and
"you would better"--never embarrassed our speech. We spoke naturally,
instinctively good English, but my parents always wanted it to be
better, that is, easier, more flexible and idiomatic. This excessive
respect for the language never led to priggishness, or precluded the
enjoyment of racy innovations. Long words were always smiled away as
pedantic, and any really excessive slang was welcomed with
amusement--but used as slang, as it were between quotation marks, and
not carelessly admitted into our speech. Luckily we all had a lively
sense of humour, and now that my brothers were at home again the house
rang with laughter. We all knew by heart "Alice in Wonderland," "The
Hunting of the Snark," and whole pages of Lear's "Nonsense Book," and
our sensitiveness to the quality of the English we spoke doubled our
enjoyment of the incredible verbal gymnastics of those immortal works.
Dear to us also, though in a lesser degree, were "Innocents Abroad,"
Bret Harte's parodies of novels, and, in their much later day, George
Ade's "Arty," and the first volumes of that great philosopher, Mr.
Dooley. I cannot remember a time when we did not, every one of us, revel
in the humorous and expressive side of American slang; what my parents
abhorred was not the picturesque use of new terms, if they were vivid
and expressive, but the habitual slovenliness of those who picked up the
slang of the year without having any idea that they were not speaking in
the purest tradition. But above all abhorrent to ears piously attuned to
all the inflexions and shades of meaning of our rich speech were such
mean substitutes as "back of" for behind, "dirt" for earth (i.e., a
"dirt road"), "any place" for anywhere, or slovenly phrases like "a
great ways," soon, alas, to be followed by the still more inexcusable "a
BARRACKS," "a WOODS," and even "a strata," "a phenomena," which, as I
grew up, a new class of the uneducated rich were rapidly introducing.

This feeling for good English was more than reverence, and nearer: it
was love. My parents' ears were wounded by an unsuitable word as those
of the musical are hurt by a false note. My mother, herself so little of
a reader, was exaggeratedly scrupulous about the books I read; not so
much the "grown-up" books as those written for children. I was never
allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because,
as my mother said, the children spoke bad English WITHOUT THE AUTHOR'S
KNOWING IT. You could do what you liked with the language if you did it
consciously, and for a given purpose--but if you went shuffling along,
trailing it after you like a rag in the dust, tramping over it, as Henry
James said, like the emigrant tramping over his kitchen oil-cloth--that
was unpardonable, there deterioration and corruption lurked. I remember
it was only with reluctance, and because "all the other children read
them," that my mother consented to my reading "Little Women" and "Little
Men"; and my ears, trained to the fresh racy English of "Alice in
Wonderland," "The Water Babies" and "The Princess and the Goblin," were
exasperated by the laxities of the great Louisa.

Perhaps our love of good English may be partly explained by the
background of books which was an essential part of the old New York
household. In my grand-parents' day every gentleman had what was called
"a gentleman's library." In my father's day, these libraries still
existed, though they were often only a background; but in our case
Macaulay, Prescott, Motley, Sainte-Beuve, Augustin Thierry, Victor Hugo,
the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, Ruskin, Coleridge, had been added to the
French and English classics in their stately calf bindings. Were these
latter ever read? Not often, I imagine; but they were there; they
represented a standard; and perhaps some mysterious emanation disengaged
itself from them, obscurely fighting for the protection of the languages
they had illustrated.

A standard; the word perhaps gives me my clue. When I said, in my
resentful youth, that I had been taught only languages and manners, I
did not know how closely, in my parents' minds, the two were related.
Bringing-up in those days was based on what was called "good breeding."
One was polite, considerate of others, careful of the accepted formulas,
because such were the principles of the well-bred. And probably the
regard of my parents for the niceties of speech was a part of their
breeding. They treated their language with the same rather ceremonious
courtesy as their friends. It would have been "bad manners" to speak
"bad" English, and "bad manners" were the supreme offence.

The fastidiousness of speech came chiefly from my mother's side, and my
father probably acquired it under her influence. His own people, though
they spoke good English, had disagreeable voices. I have noticed that
wherever, in old New York families, there was a strong admixture of
Dutch blood, the voices were flat, the diction was careless. My mother's
stock was English, without Dutch blood, and this may account for the
greater sensivetiveness of all her people to the finer shades of English
speech. In an article on Conrad which appeared in the "Times Literary
Supplement" after his death, the author said (I quote from memory):
"Conrad had worshipped the English language all his life like a lover,
but he had never romped with her in the nursery"; and this it was my
happy fate to do.

To the modern child my little-girl life at Pencraig would seem sadly
tame and uneventful, for its chief distractions were the simple ones of
swimming and riding. My mother, like most married women of her day, had
long since given up exercise, my father's only active pursuits were
boating and shooting, and there was no one to ride with me but the
coachman--nor was our end of the island a happy place for equestrianism.
I enjoyed scampering on my pony over the hard dull roads; but it was
better fun to swim in our own cove, in the jolly company of brothers,
cousins and young neighbours. There were always two or three cat-boats
moored off our point, but I never shared the passion of my father and
brothers for sailing. To be a passenger was too sedentary, and I felt no
desire to sail the boat myself, being too wrapt in dreams to burden my
mind with so exact a science. Best of all I liked our weekly walks with
Mr. Rutherfurd over what we called the Rocks--the rough moorland
country, at that time without roads or houses, extending from the placid
blue expanse of Narrangansett bay to the gray rollers of the Atlantic.
Every Sunday he used to collect the children of the few friends living
near us, and take them, with his own, for a tramp across this rugged
country to the sea.

Yet what I recall of those rambles is not so much the comradeship of the
other children, or the wise and friendly talk of our guide, as my secret
sensitiveness to the landscape--something in me quite incommunicable to
others, that was tremblingly and inarticulately awake to every detail of
wind-warped fern and wide-eyed briar rose, yet more profoundly alive to
a unifying magic beneath the diversities of the visible scene--a power
with which I was in deep and solitary communion whenever I was alone
with nature. It was the same tremor that had stirred in me in the spring
woods of Mamaroneck, when I heard the whisper of the arbutus and the
starry choir of the dogwood; and it has never since been still.

3.2.

The old New York to which I came back as a little girl meant to me
chiefly my father's library. Now for the first time I had my fill of
books. Out of doors, in the mean monotonous streets, without
architecture, without great churches or palaces, or any visible
memorials of an historic past, what could New York offer to a child
whose eyes had been filled with shapes of immortal beauty and immemorial
significance? One of the most depressing impressions of my childhood is
my recollection of the intolerable ugliness of New York, of its untended
streets and the narrow houses so lacking in external dignity, so crammed
with smug and suffocating upholstery. How could I understand that people
who had seen Rome and Seville, Paris and London, could come back to live
contentedly between Washington Square and the Central Park? What I could
not guess was that this little low-studded rectangular New York, cursed
with its universal chocolate-coloured coating of the most hideous stone
ever quarried, this cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without
towers, porticoes, fountains or perspectives, hide-bound in its deadly
uniformity of mean ugliness, would fifty years later be as much a
vanished city as Atlantis or the lowest layer of Schliemann's Troy, or
that the social organization which that prosaic setting had slowly
secreted would have been swept to oblivion with the rest. Nothing but
the Atlantis-fate of old New York, the New York which had slowly but
continuously developed from the early seventeenth century to my own
childhood, makes that childhood worth recalling now.

Looking back at that little world, and remembering the "hoard of petty
maxims" with which its elders preached down every sort of initiative, I
have often wondered at such lassitude in the descendants of the men who
first cleared a place for themselves in a new world, and then fought for
the right to be masters there. What had become of the spirit of the
pioneers and the revolutionaries? perhaps the very violence of their
effort had caused it to exhaust itself in the next generation, or the
too great prosperity succeeding on almost unexampled hardships had
produced, if not inertia, at least indifference in all matters except
business or family affairs.

Even the acquiring of wealth had ceased to interest the little society
into which I was born. In the case of some of its members, such as the
Astors and Goelets, great fortunes, originating in a fabulous increase
of New York real estate values, had been fostered by judicious
investments and prudent administration; but of feverish money-making, in
Wall Street or in railway, shipping or industrial enterprises, I heard
nothing in my youth. Some of my father's friends may have been bankers,
others have followed one of the liberal professions, usually the law; in
fact almost all the young men I knew read law for a while after leaving
college, though comparatively few practised it in after years. But for
the most part my father's contemporaries, and those of my brothers also,
were men of leisure--a term now almost as obsolete as the state it
describes. It will probably seem unbelievable to present day readers
that only one of my own near relations, and not one of my husband's, was
"in business." The group to which we belonged was composed of families
to whom a middling prosperity had come, usually by the rapid rise in
value of inherited real estate, and none of whom, apparently, aspired to
be more than moderately well off. I never in my early life came in
contact with the gold-fever in any form, and when I hear that nowadays
business life in New York is so strenuous that men and women never meet
socially before the dinner hour, I remember the delightful week-day
luncheons of my early married years, where the men were as numerous as
the women, and where one of the first rules of conversation was the one
early instilled in me by my mother: "Never talk about money, and think
about it as little as possible."

The child of the well-to-do, hedged in by nurses and governesses, seldom
knows much of its parents' activities. I have only the vaguest
recollection of the way in which my father and mother spent their days.
I know that my father was a director on the principal charitable boards
of New York--the Blind Asylum and the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum among
others; and that during Lent a ladies' "sewing class" met at our house
to work with my mother for the poor. I also recall frequent drives with
my mother, when the usual afternoon round of card-leaving was followed
by a walk in the Central Park, and a hunt for violets and hepaticas in
the secluded dells of the Ramble. In the evenings my parents went
occasionally to the theatre, but never, as far as I remember, to a
concert, or any kind of musical performance, until the Opera, then only
sporadic, became an established entertainment, to which one went (as in
eighteenth century Italy) chiefly if not solely for the pleasure of
conversing with one's friends. Their most frequent distraction was
dining out or dinner giving. Sometimes the dinners were stately and
ceremonious (with engraved invitations issued three weeks in advance,
soups, "thick" and "clear," and a Roman punch half way through the
menu), but more often they were intimate and sociable, though always the
occasion of much excellent food and old wine being admirably served, and
discussed with suitable gravity.

My father had inherited from his family a serious tradition of good
cooking, with a cellar of vintage clarets, and of Madeira which had
rounded the Cape. The "Jones" Madeira (my father's) and the "Newbold"
(my uncle's) enjoyed a particular celebrity even in that day of noted
cellars. The following generation, interested only in champagne and
claret, foolishly dispersed these precious stores. My brothers sold my
father's cellar soon after his death; and after my marriage, dining in a
nouveau riche house of which the master was unfamiliar with old New York
cousinships, I had pressed on me, as a treat not likely to have come the
way of one of my modest condition, a glass of "the famous Newbold
Madeira."

My mother, if left to herself, would probably not have been much
interested in the pleasures of the table. My father's Dutch blood
accounted for his gastronomic enthusiasm; his mother, who was a
Schermerhorn, was reputed to have the best cook in New York. But to know
about good cooking was a part of every young wife's equipment, and my
mother's favourite cookery books (Francatelli's and Mrs. Leslie's) are
thickly interleaved with sheets of yellowing note paper, on which, in a
script of ethereal elegance, she records the making of "Mrs. Joshua
Jones's scalloped oysters with cream," "Aunt Fanny Gallatin's fried
chicken," "William Edgar's punch," and the special recipes of our two
famous negro cooks, Mary Johnson and Susan Minneman. These great artists
stand out, brilliantly turbaned and ear-ringed, from a Snyders-like
background of game, fish and vegetables transformed into a succession of
succulent repasts by their indefatigable blue-nailed hands: Mary
Johnson, a gaunt towering woman of a rich bronzy black, with huge golden
hoops in her ears, and crisp African crinkles under vividly patterned
kerchiefs; Susan Minneman, a small smiling mulatto, more quietly
attired, but as great a cook as her predecessor.

Ah, what artists they were! How simple yet sure were their methods--the
mere perfection of broiling, roasting and basting--and what an
unexampled wealth of material, vegetable and animal, their genius had to
draw upon! Who will ever again taste anything in the whole range of
gastronomy to equal their corned beef, their boiled turkeys with stewed
celery and oyster sauce, their fried chickens, broiled red-heads, corn
fritters, stewed tomatoes, rice griddle cakes, strawberry short-cake and
vanilla ices? I am now enumerating only our daily fare, that from which
even my tender years did not exclude me; but when my parents "gave a
dinner," and terrapin and canvas-back ducks, or (in their season)
broiled Spanish mackerel, soft-shelled crabs with a mayonnaise of
celery, and peach-fed Virginia hams cooked in champagne (I am no doubt
confusing all the seasons in this allegoric evocation of their riches),
lima-beans in cream, corn souffles and salads of oyster-crabs, poured in
varied succulence from Mary Johnson's lifted cornucopia--ah, then, the
gourmet of that long-lost day, when cream was cream and butter butter
and coffee coffee, and meat fresh every day, and game hung just for the
proper number of hours, might lean back in his chair and murmur "Fate
cannot harm me" over his cup of Moka and his glass of authentic
Chartreuse.

I have lingered over these details because they formed a part--a most
important and honourable part--of that ancient curriculum of
house-keeping which, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries, was so soon to
be swept aside by the "monstrous regiment" of the emancipated: young
women taught by their elders to despise the kitchen and the linen room,
and to substitute the acquiring of University degrees for the more
complex art of civilized living. The movement began when I was young,
and now that I am old, and have watched it and noted its results, I
mourn more than ever the extinction of the household arts. Cold storage,
deplorable as it is, has done far less harm to the home than the Higher
Education.

And what of the guests who gathered at my father's table to enjoy the
achievements of the Dark Ladies? I remember a mild blur of rosy and
white-whiskered gentlemen, of ladies with bare sloping shoulders rising
flower-like from voluminous skirts, peeped at from the stair-top while
wraps were removed in the hall below. A great sense of leisure emanated
from their kindly faces and voices. No motors waited to rush them on to
ball or opera; balls were few and widely spaced, the opera just
beginning; and "Opera night" would not have been chosen for one of my
mother's big dinners. There being no haste, and a prodigious amount of
good food to be disposed of, the guests sat long at table; and when my
mother bowed slightly to the lady facing her on my father's right, and
flounces and trains floated up the red velvet stair-carpet to the
white-and-gold drawing-room with tufted purple satin arm-chairs, and
voluminous purple satin curtains festooned with buttercup yellow fringe,
the gentlemen settled down again to claret and Madeira, sent duly
westward, and followed by coffee and Havana cigars.

My parents' guests ate well, and drank good wine with discernment; but a
more fastidious taste had shortened the enormous repasts and deep
bumpers of colonial days, and in twenty minutes the whiskered gentlemen
had joined the flounced ladies on the purple settees for another half
hour of amiable chat, accompanied by the cup of tea which always rounded
off the evening. How mild and leisurely it all seems in the glare of our
new century! Small parochial concerns no doubt formed the staple of the
talk. Art and music and literature were rather timorously avoided
(unless Trollope's last novel were touched upon, or a discreet allusion
made to Mr. William Astor's audacious acquisition of a Bouguereau
Venus), and the topics chiefly dwelt on were personal: the thoughtful
discussion of food, wine, horses ("high steppers" were beginning to be
much sought after), the laying out and planting of country-seats, the
selection of "specimen" copper beeches and fern-leaved maples for lawns
just beginning to be shorn smooth by the new hand-mowers, and those
plans of European travel which filled so large a space in the thought of
old New Yorkers. From my earliest infancy I had always seen about me
people who were either just arriving from "abroad" or just embarking on
a European tour. The old New Yorker was in continual contact with the
land of his fathers, and it was not until I went to Boston on my
marriage that I found myself in a community of wealthy and sedentary
people seemingly too lacking in intellectual curiosity to have any
desire to see the world.

I have always been perplexed by the incuriosity of New England with
regard to the rest of the world, for New Yorkers of my day were never so
happy as when they were hurrying on board the ocean liner which was to
carry them to new lands. Those whose society my parents frequented did
not, perhaps, profit much by the artistic and intellectual advantages of
European travel, and to social opportunities they were half-resentfully
indifferent. It was thought vulgar and snobbish to try to make the
acquaintance, in London, Paris or Rome, of people of the class
corresponding to their own. The Americans who forced their way into good
society in Europe were said to be those who were shut out from it at
home; and the self-respecting American on his travels frequented only
the little "colonies" of his compatriots already settled in the European
capitals, and only their most irreproachable members! What these artless
travellers chiefly enjoyed were scenery, ruins and historic sites;
places about which some sentimental legend hung, and to which Scott,
Byron, Hans Andersen, Bulwer, Washington Irving or Hawthorne gently led
the timid sight-seer. Public ceremonials also, ecclesiastical or royal,
were much appreciated, though of the latter only distant glimpses could
be caught, since it would have been snobbish to ask, through one's
Legation, for reserved seats or invitations. And as for the American
women who had themselves presented at the English Court--well, one had
only to see with whom they associated at home!

However, ruins, snow-mountains, lakes and water-falls--especially
water-falls--were endlessly enjoyable; and in the great cities there
were the shops! In them, as Henry James acutely noted in "The Pension
Beaurepas," the American woman found inexhaustible consolation for the
loneliness and inconveniences of life in foreign lands. But, lest I seem
to lay undue stress on the limitations of my compatriots, it must be
remembered that, even in more sophisticated societies, cultivated
sight-seeing was hardly known in those days. One need only glance
through the "Travels" of the early nineteenth century to see how little,
before Ruskin, the average well-educated tourist of any country was
prepared to observe and enjoy. The intellectual few, at the end of the
eighteenth century, had been taught by Arhtur Young to travel with an
eye to agriculture and geology; and Goethe, in Sicily, struck Syracuse
and Girgenti from his itinerary, and took the monotonous and exhausting
route across the middle of the island, in order to see with his own eyes
why it had been called the granary of Rome. Meanwhile the simpler
majority collected scraps of marble from the Forum, pressed maidenhair
fern from the temple of Vesta at Tivoli, or daisies from the grave of
Shelley, and bought edelweiss gummed on cardboard from the guides of
Chamonix, and copies of Guido's "Aurora" and Caravaggio's "Gamesters"
from the Roman picture-dealers.

At that very time a handsome blue-eyed young man with a scarred mouth
was driving across the continent in his parents' travelling carriage,
and looking with wondering eyes at the Giottos of the Arena Chapel and
the Cimabues of Assisi; at that time a young architect, poor and
unknown, was toiling through the by-ways of Castile, Galicia and
Andalusia in jolting diligences, or over stony mule-tracks, and
recording in a series of exquisite drawings the unknown wonders of
Spanish architecture; and Browning was dreaming of "The Ring and the
Book"--and Shelley had long since written "The Cenci." But to the
average well-to-do traveller Hawthorne's "Marble Faun," Bulwer's "Last
Days of Pompeii" and Washington Irving's "Alhambra" were still the last
word on Spain and Italy.

3.3.

I have wandered far from my father's library. Though it had the leading
share in my growth I have let myself be drawn from it by one scene after
another of my parents' life in New York or on their travels. But the
library calls me back, and I pause on its threshold, averting my eyes
from the monstrous oak mantel supported on the heads of vizored knights,
and looking past them at the rows of handsome bindings and familiar
names. The library probably did not contain more than seven or eight
hundred volumes. My father was a younger son, and my mother had a
brother to whom most of the books on her side of the family went. (I
remember on my uncle's shelves an unexpurgated Hogarth, splendidly bound
in eighteenth century crushed Levant, with which my little cousins and I
quite innocently and unharmedly beguiled ourselves.) The library to
which I had access contained therefore few inherited books; I remember
chiefly, in the warm shabby calf of the period, complete editions of
Swift, Sterne, Defoe, the "Spectator," Shakespeare, Milton, the Percy
reliques--and Hannah More! Most of the other books must have been
acquired by my father. Though few they were well-chosen, and the fact
that their number was so limited probably helped to fix their contents
in my memory. At any rate, long before the passing of years and a
succession of deaths brought them back to me, I could at any moment
visualize the books contained in those low oak bookcases. My mother,
perplexed by the discovery that she had produced an omnivorous reader,
and not knowing how to direct my reading, had perhaps expected the
governess to do it for her. Being an indolent woman, she finally turned
the difficulty by reviving a rule of her own schoolroom days, and
decreeing that I should never read a novel without asking her
permission. I was a painfully conscientious child and, conforming
literally to this decree, I submitted to her every work of fiction which
attracted my fancy. In order to save further trouble she almost always
refused to let me read it--a fact hardly to be wondered at, since her
own mother had forbidden her to read any of Scott's novels, except
"Waverley," till after she was married! At all events, of the many
prohibitions imposed on me--most of which, as I look back, I see little
reason to regret--there is none for which I am more grateful than this,
though it extended its rigours even to one of the works of Charlotte M.
Yonge! By denying me the opportunity of wasting my time over ephemeral
rubbish my mother threw me back on the great classics, and thereby
helped to give my mind a temper which my too-easy studies could not have
produced. I was forbidden to read Whyte Melville, Rhoda Broughton, "The
Duchess," and all the lesser novelists of the day; but before me
stretched the wide expanse of the classics, English, French and German,
and into that sea of wonders I plunged at will. Nowadays a reader might
see only the lacunae of the little library in which my mind was formed;
but, small as it was, it included most of the essentials. The principal
historians were Plutarch, Macaulay, Prescott, Parkman, Froude, Carlyle,
Lamartine, Thiers; the diaries and letters included Evelyn, Pepys, White
of Selborne, Cowper, Mme de Sevigne, Fanny Burney, Moore, the Journals
of the Misses Berry; the "poetical works" (in addition to several
anthologies, such as Knight's "Half Hours with the Best Authors" and
Lamb's precious selections from the Elizabethan dramatists) were those
of Homer (in Pope's and Lord Derby's versions), Longfellow's Dante,
Milton, Herbert, Pope, Cowper, Gray, Thomson, Byron, Moore, Scott,
Burns, Wordsworth, Campbell, Coleridge, Shelley (I wonder how or why?),
Longfellow, Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Browning--though not as yet the writer
described in one of the anthologies of the period as "the husband of
Elizabeth Barrett, and himself no mean poet." He was to come later, as a
present from my sister-in-law, and to be one of the great Awakeners of
my childhood.

Among the French poets were Corneille, Racine, Lafontaine and Victor
Hugo, though, oddly enough, of Lamartine the poet there was not a page,
nor yet of Chenier, Vigny or Musset. Among French prose classics there
were, of course, Sainte-Beuve's "Lundis," bracing fare for a young mind,
Sevigne the divinely loitering, Augustin Thierry and Philarete Chasles.
Art history and criticism were represented by Lacroix's big volumes, so
richly and exquisitely illustrated, on art, architecture and costume in
the middle ages, by Schliemann's "Ilias" and "Troja," by Gwilt's
Encyclopaedia of Architecture, by Kugler, Mrs. Jameson, P.G. Hamerton,
and the Ruskin of "Modern Painters" and the "Seven Lamps," together with
a volume of "Selections" (appropriately bound in purple cloth) of all
his purplest patches; to which my father, for my benefit, added "Stones
of Venice" and "Walks in Florence" when we returned to Europe and the
too-short days of our joint sight-seeing began.

In philosophy, I recall little but Victor Cousin and Coleridge ("The
Friend" and "Aids to Reflection"); among essaysists, besides Addison,
there were Lamb and Macaulay; in the way of travel, I remember chiefly
Arctic explorations. As for fiction, after the eighteenth century
classics, Miss Burney and Scott of course led the list; but,
mysteriously enough, Richardson was lacking, save for an abridged
version of "Clarissa Harlowe" (and a masterly performance that
abridgement was, as I remember it). No doubt Richardson, with Smollett
and Fielding, fell to my uncle's share, and were too much out-of-date to
be thought worth replacing. Thus, except for Scott, there was a great
gap until one came to Washington Irving, that charming hybrid on whom my
parents' thoughts could dwell at ease, because, in spite of the
disturbing fact that he "wrote," he was a gentleman, and a friend of the
family. For my parents and their group, though they held literature in
great esteem, stood in nervous dread of those who produced it.
Washington Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck and William Dana were the only
representatives of the disquieting art who were deemed uncontaminated by
it; though Longfellow, they admitted, if a popular poet, was
nevertheless a gentleman. As for Herman Melville, a cousin of the Van
Rensselaers, and qualified by birth to figure in the best society, he
was doubtless excluded from it by his deplorable Bohemianism, for I
never heard his name mentioned, or saw one of his books. Banished
probably for the same reasons were Poe, that drunken and demoralized
Baltimorean, and the brilliant wastrel Fitz James O'Brien, who was still
further debased by "writing for the newspapers." But worse still perhaps
in my parents' eyes was the case of such unhappy persons as Joseph
Drake, author of "The Culprit Fay," balanced between "fame and infamy"
as not quite of the best society, and writing not quite the best poetry.
I cannot hope to render the tone in which my mother pronounced the names
of such unfortunates, or, on the other hand, that of Mrs. Beecher Stowe,
who was so "common" yet so successful. On the whole, my mother doubtless
thought, it would be simpler if people one might be exposed to meeting
would refrain from meddling with literature.

Considering the stacks of novels which she, my aunts and my grandmother
annually devoured, their attitude seems singularly ungrateful; but it
was probably prompted by the sort of diffidence which, thank heaven, no
psycho-analyst had yet arisen to call a "complex." In the eyes of our
provincial society authorship was still regarded as something between a
black art and a form of manual labour. My father and mother and their
friends were only one generation away from Sir Walter Scott, who thought
it necessary to drape his literary identity in countless clumsy
subterfuges, and almost contemporary with the Brontes, who shrank in
agony from being suspected of successful novel-writing. But I am sure
the chief element in their reluctance to encounter the literary was an
awestruck dread of the intellectual effort that might be required of
them. They were genuinely modest and shy in the presence of any one who
wrote or painted. To sing was still a drawing-room accomplishment, and I
had two warbling cousins who had studied with the great opera singers;
but authors and painters lived in a world unknown and incalculable. In
addition to its mental atmosphere, its political and moral ideas might
be contaminating, and there was a Kilmeny-touch about those who
adventured into it and came back.

Meanwhile, though living authors were so remote, the dead were my most
living companions. I was a healthy little girl who loved riding,
swimming and romping; yet no children of my own age, and none even among
the nearest of my grown-ups, were as close to me as the great voices
that spoke to me from books. Whenever I try to recall my childhood it is
in my father's library that it comes to life. I am squatting again on
the thick Turkey rug, pulling open one after another the glass doors of
the low bookcases, and dragging out book after book in a secret ecstasy
of communion. I say "secret," for I cannot remember ever speaking to any
one of these enraptured sessions. The child knows instinctively when it
will be understood, and from the first I kept my adventures with books
to myself. But perhaps it was not only the "misunderstood" element, so
common in meditative infancy, that kept me from talking of my
discoveries. There was in me a secret retreat where I wished no one to
intrude, or at least no one whom I had yet encountered. Words and
cadences haunted it like song-birds in a magic wood, and I wanted to be
able to steal away and listen when they called. When I was about fifteen
or sixteen I tried to write an essay on English verse rhythms. I never
got beyond the opening paragraph, but that came straight out of my
secret wood. It ran: "No one who cannot feel the enchantment of 'Yet
once more, O ye laurels, and once more,' without knowing even the next
line, or having any idea whatever of the context of the poem, has begun
to understand the beauty of English poetry." For the moment that was
enough of ecstasy; but I wanted to be always free to steal away to it.

It was obvious that a little girl with such cravings, and to whom the
old Testament, the Apocalypse and the Elizabethan dramatists were open,
could not long pine for Whyte Melville or even Rhoda Broughton. Ah, the
long music-drunken hours on that library floor, with Isaiah and the Song
of Solomon and the Book of Esther, and "Modern Painters," and Augustin
Thierry's Merovingians, and Knight's "Half Hours," and that rich mine of
music, Dana's "Household Book of Poetry"! Presently kind friends began
to endow me with a little library of my own, and I was reading "Faust"
and "Wilhelm Meister," "Philip Van Arteveld," "Men and Women" and
"Dramatis Personae" in the intervals between "The Broken Heart" and "The
Duchess of Malfy," "Phedre" and "Andromaque." And there was one supreme
day when, my mother having despairingly asked our old literary advisor,
Mr. North at Scribner's, "what she could give the child for her
birthday," I woke to find beside my bed Buxton Forman's great editions
of Keats and Shelley! Then the gates of the realms of gold swung wide,
and from that day to this I don't believe I was ever again, in my inmost
self, wholly lonely or unhappy.

By the time I was seventeen, though I had not read every book in my
father's library, I had looked into them all. Those I devoured first
were the poets and the few literary critics, foremost of course
Sainte-Beuve. Ruskin fed me with visions of Italy for which I had never
ceased to pine, and Freeman's delightful "Subject and Neighbour Lands of
Venice," Mrs. Jameson's amiable volumes, and Kugler's "Handbook of
Italian Painting," gave a firmer outline to these visions. But the books
which made the strongest impression on me--doubtless because they
reached a part of my mind that no one had thought of arousing--were two
shabby volumes unearthed among my brother's college text-books: an
abridgement of Sir William Hamilton's "History of Philosophy" and a
totally forgotten work called "Coppee's Elements of Logic." This first
introduction to the technique of thinking developed the bony structure
about which my vague gelatinous musings could cling and take shape; and
Darwin and Pascal, Hamilton And Coppee ranked foremost among my
Awakeners.

In a day when youthful innocence was rated so high my mother may be
thought to have chosen a singular way of preserving mine when she
deprived me of the Victorian novel but made me free of the old Testament
and the Elizabethans. Her plan was certainly not premeditated; but had
it been, she could not have shown more insight. Those great pages, those
high themes, purged my imagination; and I cannot recall ever trying to
puzzle out allusions which in tamer garb might have roused my curiosity.
Once, at the house of a little girl friend, rummaging with her through a
neglected collection of books which her parents had acquired with the
property, and never since looked at, we came upon a small volume which
seemed to burst into fiery bloom in our hands.

Forth, ballad, and take roses in both arms,
Even till the top rose touch thee in the throat
Where the least thornprick harms;
And girdled in thy golden singing-coat,
Come thou before my lady and say this:
Borgia, thy gold hair's colour burns in me,
Thy mouth makes beat my blood in feverish rhymes;
Therefore so many as these roses be,
Kiss me so many times.

But this, like all the rest, merely enriched the complex music of my
strange inner world. I do not mean to defend the sheltered education
against the system which expounds physiological mysteries in the
nursery; I am not sure which is best. But I am sure that great
literature does not excite premature curiosities in normally constituted
children; and I can give a comic proof of the fact, for though "The
White Devil," "Faust" and "Poems and Ballads" were among my early
story-books, all I knew about adultery (against which we were warned
every week in church) was that those who "committed" it were penalized
by having to pay higher fares in travelling: a conclusion arrived at by
my once seeing on a ferry-boat the sign: "Adults 50 cents; children 25
cents"!

This ferment of reading revived my story-telling fever; but now I wanted
to write and not to improvise. My first attempt (at the age of eleven)
was a novel, which began: "'Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown?' said Mrs.
Tompkins. 'If only I had known you were going to call I should have
tidied up the drawing-room.'" Timorously I submitted this to my mother,
and never shall I forget the sudden drop of my creative frenzy when she
returned it with the icy comment: "Drawing-rooms are always tidy."

This was so crushing to a would-be novelist of manners that it shook me
rudely out of my dream of writing fiction, and I took to poetry instead.
It was not thought necessary to feed my literary ambitions with
foolscap, and for lack of paper I was driven to begging for the
wrappings of the parcels delivered at the house. After a while these
were regarded as belonging to me, and I always kept a stack in my room.
It never occurred to me to fold and cut the big brown sheets, and I used
to spread them on the floor and travel over them on my hands and knees,
building up long parallel columns of blank verse headed: "Scene: A
Venetian palace," or "Dramatis Personae" (which I never knew how to
pronounce).

My dear governess, seeing my perplexity over the structure of English
verse, gave me a work called "Quackenbos's Rhetoric," which warned one
not to speak of the oyster as a "succulent bivalve," and pointed out
that even Shakespeare nodded when he made Hamlet "take arms against a
sea of troubles." Mr. Quackenbos disposed of the delicate problems of
English metric by squeezing them firmly into the classic categories, so
that Milton was supposed to have written in "iambic pentameters," and
all superfluous syllables were got rid of (as in the eighteenth century)
by elisions and apostrophes. Always respectful of the rules of the game,
I tried to cabin my Muse within these bounds, and once when, in a moment
of unheard-of audacity, I sent a poem to a newspaper (I think "The
World"), I wrote to the editor apologizing for the fact that my metre
was "irregular," but adding firmly that, though I was only a little
girl, I wished this irregularity to be respected, as it was
"intentional." The editor published the poem, and wrote back politely
that he had no objection to irregular metres himself; and thereafter I
breathed more freely. My poetic experiments, however, were destined to
meet with the same discouragement as my fiction. Having vainly attempted
a tragedy in five acts I turned my mind to short lyrics, which I poured
out with a lamentable facility. My brother showed some of these to one
of his friends, an amiable and cultivated Bostonian named Allen
Thorndike Rice, who afterward became the owner and editor of the "North
American Review." Allen Rice very kindly sent the poems to the aged
Longfellow, to whom his mother's family were related; and on the bard's
recommendation some of my babblings appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly."
Happily this experiment was not repeated; and any undue pride I might
have felt in it was speedily dashed by my young patron's remarking to me
one day: "You know, writing lyrics won't lead you anywhere. What you
want to do is to write an epic. All the great poets have written epics.
Homer...Milton...Byron. Why don't you try your hand at something like
'Don Juan'?" This was a hard saying to a dreamy girl of fifteen, and I
shrank back into my secret retreat, convinced that I was unfitted to be
either a poet or a novelist. I did, indeed, attempt another novel, and
carried this one to its close; but it was destined for the private
enjoyment of a girlfriend, and was never exposed to the garish light of
print. It exists to this day, beautifully written out in a thick
copy-book, with a title page inscribed "Fast and Loose," and an epigraph
from Owen Meredith's "Lucile":

Let Woman beware
How she plays fast and loose with human despair,
And the storm in Man's heart.

Title and epigraph were terrifyingly exemplified in the tale, but it
closed on a note of mournful resignation, with the words: "And every
year when April comes the violets bloom again on Georgie's grave."

After this I withdrew to secret communion with the Muse. I continued to
cover vast expanses of wrapping paper with prose and verse, but the
dream of a literary career, momentarily shadowed forth by one miraculous
adventure, soon faded into unreality. How could I ever have supposed I
could be an author? I had never even seen one in the flesh!


CHAPTER 4. UNRELUCTANT FEET.

4.1.

In one of the most famous poems of my first literary protector the
Maiden is supposed to arrive with reluctant feet "where the brook and
river meet." I cannot say that my own feet were thus hampered. I was
contented enough with swimming and riding, with my dogs, and my reading
and dreaming, but I longed to travel and see new places, and, short of
that, was by no means averse to seeing new people, and especially to
being regarded as "grown up."

I had not long to wait, for when I was seventeen my parents decided that
I spent too much time in reading, and that I was to come out a year
before the accepted age. The New York mothers of that day usually gave a
series of "coming out" entertainments for debutante daughters, leading
off with a huge tea and an expensive ball. My mother thought this
absurd. She said her daughter could meet all the people she need know
without being advertised by a general entertainment; and as my family
kept open house, and as the younger of my two brothers was very popular
in society, it was easy enough to launch me in this informal way. I was
therefore put into a low-necked bodice of pale green brocade, above a
white muslin skirt ruffled with rows and rows of Valenciennes, my hair
was piled up on top of my head, some friend of the family sent me a
large bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley, and thus adorned I was taken by
my parents to a ball at Mrs. Morton's, in Fifth Avenue. Houses with
ball-rooms were still few in New York: almost the only ones were those
of the Astors, the Mortons, the Belmonts and my cousins the
Schermerhorns. As a rule, hostesses who wished to give a dance hired the
ball-room at Delmonico's restaurant; but my mother would never have
consented to my making my first appearance in a public room, so to Mrs.
Morton's we went. To me the evening was a long cold agony of shyness.
All my brother's friends asked me to dance, but I was too much
frightened to accept, and cowered beside my mother in speechless misery,
unable even to exchange a word with the friendly young men whom I
regarded as elder brothers when they lunched and dined at our house.

This shyness, though it long troubled me in general company, soon
vanished when I was with my friends. New York society was not at that
time divided into water-tight compartments by differences of age. The
pleasantest houses were those of a group of young married women who all
through the season gave a succession of small dinners, informal Sunday
lunches and after-theatre suppers. They were all friendly and welcoming
to any young girl "who could talk," and the great ambition of the
debutante was to be invited to their houses and treated on an equal
footing by them, and by the "older men" whose attentions were thought so
much more flattering than those of callow youths just out of college.
This luck befell me, thanks chiefly to my brother Harry's popularity,
and invitations poured in after my first sad evening. Like all agreeable
societies, ours was small, and the people composing it met almost every
day, and always sought each other out in any larger company. Some of the
hostesses had drawing-rooms big enough for informal dances, and to be
invited to these was the privilege of a half-dozen of the younger girls.
A season of opera at the old Academy of Music was now an established
event of the winter, and on Mondays and Fridays we met each other there;
Wednesday being, for some obscure tribal reason, the night on which
boxes were sent to dull relations and visitors from out of town, while
the inner circle disported itself elsewhere. Our society was, in short,
a little "set" with its private catch-words, observances and amusements,
and its indifference to anything outside of its charmed circle; and no
really entertaining social group has ever been anything else. The ages
of the people composing it ranged from eighteen to fifty; but all were
young in spirit, mostly good-looking, and full of gaiety and humour. The
talk was never intellectual and seldom brilliant, but it was always easy
and sometimes witty, and a charming informality had replaced the
ceremonious dullness of my parents' day. I doubt if New York society was
ever simpler, gayer, or more pleasantly sophisticated, than it was then.

I enjoyed myself thoroughly that winter, and still more so the following
summer, when Pencraig was full of merry young people, and the new game
of lawn tennis, played on our lawn by young gentlemen in tail coats and
young ladies in tight whale-boned dresses, began to supersede the
hitherto fashionable archery. Every room in our house was always full in
summer, and I remember jolly bathing parties from the floating
boat-landing at the foot of the lawn, mackerel-fishing, races in rival
cat-boats, and an occasional excursion up the bay, or out to sea when
the weather was calm enough, on one of the pretty white steam-yachts
which were beginning to be the favourite toys of the rich.

On one of these yachting-parties I made an acquaintance which some
unlucky chance kept me from renewing. A thin young man with intelligent
eyes was brought up and introduced as Cecil Spring-Rice, then, I think,
a secretary at the British Legation in Washington. Spring-Rice was
already--or became soon afterward--the friend of several of my most
intimate friends, and the affectionate nickname of "Springy" was as
familiar to me as that of one of my own intimates. But, to my loss, we
were never to meet again; and I record our single encounter only because
his delightful talk so illuminated an otherwise dull afternoon that I
have