But the trouble is that now she wants to show me how to run this poor little unfashionable boat so as to make a good show with the rest of them, and I don't want to learn. It's easier to keep out of the regatta. My card-receiver is full of most desirable names of people who have come in their fashionable carriages and coupés, and they have "oh'd" and "ah'd" in my little parlors, and declared they were "quite sweet," and "so odd," and "so different, you know;" but, for all that, I don't think I shall try to keep up all this gay circle of acquaintances. Carriage-hire costs money; and when paid for by the hour, one asks whether the acquaintances are worth it. But there are some real noble-hearted people that I mean to keep. The Van Astrachans, for instance. Mrs. Van Astrachan is a solid lump of goodness and motherliness, and that sweet Mrs. Harry Endicott is most lovable. You remember Harry Endicott, I suppose, and what a trump card he was thought to be among the girls, one time when you were visiting us, and afterwards all that scandal about him and that pretty little Mrs. John Seymour? She is dead now, I hear, and he has married this pretty Rose Ferguson, a friend of hers; and since his wife has taken him in hand, he has turned out to be a noble fellow. They live up on Madison avenue quite handsomely. They are among the "real folks" Mrs. Whitney tells about, and I think I must keep them. The Elmores I don't care much for. They are a frivolous, fast set, and what's the use? Sophie and her husband, my old friend Wat Sydney, I keep mainly because she won't give me up. She is one of the clinging sort, and is devoted to me. They have a perfect palace up by the park – it is quite a show-house, and is, I understand, to be furnished by Harter. So, you see, it's like a friendship between princess and peasant.
Now, I foresee future conflicts with Aunt Maria in all these possibilities. She is a nice woman, and bent on securing what she thinks my interest, but I can't help seeing that she is somewhat
The success of my card-receiver delights her, and not to improve such opportunities would be, in her view, to bury one's talent in a napkin. Yet, after all, I differ. I can't help seeing that intimacies between people with a hundred thousand a year and people of our modest means will be full of perplexities.
And then I say, Why not try to find all the neighborliness I can on my own street? In a country village, one finds a deal in one's neighbors, simply because one must. They are there; they are all one has, and human nature is always interesting, if one takes it right side out. Next door is the gentle Quakeress I told you of. She is nobody in the gay world, but as full of sweetness and loving kindness as heart could desire. Then right across the way are two antiquated old ladies, very old, very precise, and very funny, who have come in state and called on me; bringing with them the most lovely, tyrannical little terrier, who behaved like a small-sized fiend and shocked them dreadfully. I spy worlds of interest in their company if once I can rub the stiffness out of our acquaintance, and then I hope to get the run of the delightfully queer old house.
Then there are our set – Jim Fellows, and Bolton, and my sister Alice, and the girls – in and out all the time. We sha'n't want for society. So if Aunt Maria puts me up for a career in the gay world I shall hang heavy on her hands.
I haven't much independence myself, but it is no longer I, it is We. Eva Van Arsdel alone was anybody's property; Mamma talked her one way, her sister Ida another way, and Aunt Maria a third; and among them all her own little way was hard to find. But now Harry and I have formed a firm and compact We, which is a fortress into which we retreat from all the world. I tell them all, We don't think so, and We don't do so. Isn't that nice? When will you come and see us?
CHAPTER III
THE FAMILY DICTATOR AT WORK
From the foregoing letter our readers may have conjectured that the natural self-appointed ruler of the fortunes of the Van Arsdel family was "Aunt Maria," or Mrs. Maria Wouvermans.
That is to say, this lady had always considered such to be her mission, and had acted upon this supposition up to the time that Mr. Van Arsdel's failure made shipwreck of the fortunes of the family.
Aunt Maria had, so to speak, reveled in the fortune and position of the Van Arsdels. She had dictated the expenditures of their princely income; she had projected parties and entertainments; she had supervised lists of guests to be invited; she had ordered dresses and carriages and equipages, and hired and dismissed servants at her sovereign will and pleasure. Nominally, to be sure, Mrs. Van Arsdel attended to all these matters; but really Aunt Maria was the power behind the throne. Mrs. Van Arsdel was a pretty, graceful, self-indulgent woman, who loved ease and hated trouble – a natural climbing plant who took kindly to any bean-pole in her neighborhood, and Aunt Maria was her bean-pole. Mrs. Van Arsdel's wealth, her station, her éclat, her blooming daughters, all climbed up, so to speak, on Aunt Maria, and hung their flowery clusters around her, to her praise and glory. Besides all this, there were very solid and appreciable advantages in the wealth and station of the Van Arsdel family as related to the worldly enjoyment of Mrs. Maria Wouvermans. Being a widow, connected with an old rich family, and with but a small fortune of her own and many necessities of society upon her, Mrs. Wouvermans had found her own means in several ways supplemented and carried out by the redundant means of her sister. Mrs. Wouvermans lived in a moderate house on Murray Hill, within comfortable proximity to the more showy palaces of the New York nobility. She had old furniture, old silver, camel's hair shawls and jewelry sufficient to content her heart, but her yearly income was far below her soul's desires, and necessitated more economy than she liked. While the Van Arsdels were in full tide of success she felt less the confinement of these limits. What need for her to keep a carriage when a carriage and horses were always at her command for the asking – and even without asking, as not infrequently came to be the case? Then, the Van Arsdel parties and hospitalities relieved her from all expensive obligations of society. She returned the civilities of her friends by invitations to her sister's parties and receptions; and it is an exceedingly convenient thing to have all the glory of hospitality and none of the trouble – to have convenient friends to entertain for you any person or persons with whom you may be desirous of keeping up amicable relations. On the whole, Mrs Wouvermans was probably sincere in the professions, to which Mr. Van Arsdel used to listen with a quiet amused smile, that "she really enjoyed Nelly's fortune more than if it were her own."
"Haven't a doubt of it," he used to say, with a twinkle of his eye which he never further explained.
Mr. Van Arsdel's failure had nearly broken Aunt Maria's heart. In fact, the dear lady took the matter more sorely than the good man himself.
Mr. Van Arsdel was, in a small dry way, something of a philosopher. He was a silent man for the most part, but had his own shrewd comments on the essential worth of men and things – particularly of men in the feminine gender. He had never checked his pretty wife in any of her aspirations, which he secretly valued at about their real value; he had never quarreled with Aunt Maria or interfered with her sway in his family within certain limits, because he had sense enough to see that she was the stronger of the two women, and that his wife could no more help yielding to her influence than a needle can help sticking to a magnet.
But the race of fashionable life, its outlays of health and strength, its expenditures for parties, and for dress and equipage, its rivalries, its gossip, its eager frivolities, were all matters of which he took quiet note, and which caused him often to ponder the words of the wise man of old, "What profit hath a man of all his labor and the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath labored under the sun?"
To Mr. Van Arsdel's eye the only profit of his labor and travail seemed to be the making of his wife frivolous, filling her with useless worries, training his daughters to be idle and self-indulgent, and his sons to be careless and reckless of expenditure. So when at last the crash came, there was a certain sense of relief in finding himself once more an honest man at the bottom of the hill, and he quietly resolved in his inmost soul that he never would climb again. He had settled up his affairs with a manly exactness that won the respect of all his creditors, and they had put him into a salaried position which insured a competence, and with this he resolved to be contented; his wife