University of Virginia Library

20. CHAPTER XX.
I BECOME A FAMILY FRIEND.

I HAVE often had occasion to admire the philosophical
justice of popular phrases. The ordinary
cant phraseology of life generally represents a
homely truth because it has grown upon reality like a lichen
upon a rock. “Falling in love” is a phrase of this kind; it
represents just that phenomenon which is all the time happening
among the sons and daughters of Adam in most unforeseen
times and seasons, and often when the subject least
intends it, and even intends something quite the contrary.

The popular phrase “falling in love” denotes something
that comes unexpectedly. One may walk into love preparedly,
advisedly, with the eyes of one's understanding open;
but one falls in love as one falls down stairs in a dark entry,
simply because the foot is set where there is nothing for
it to stand on, which I take to be a simile of most philosophical
good resolutions.

I flattered myself at this period of my existence, that I
was a thorough-paced philosopher; a man that had outlived
the snares and illusions of youth, and held himself and all
his passions and affections under most perfect control.

The time had not yet come marked out in my supreme
wisdom for me to meditate matrimonial ideas: in the mean
while, I resolved to make the most of that pleasant and convenient
arbor on the Hill Difficulty which is commonly
called Friendship.

Concerning this arbor I have certain observations to
make. It is most commodiously situated, and commands
charming prospects. We are informed of some, that on a
clear day one can see from it quite plainly as far as to the
Delectable Mountains. From my own experience I have no

doubt of this fact. For a young man of five-and-twenty or
thereabouts, not at present in circumstances to marry, what
is more charming than to become the intimate friend in a
circle of vivacious and interesting young ladies, in easy
circumstances, who live in a palace surrounded by all the
elegancies, refinements, and comforts of life?

More blissful still, if he be welcomed to these bowers of
beauty by a charming and courteous mamma who hopes
he will make himself at home, and assures him that they
will treat him quite as one of the family. This means, of
course, that perfect confidence is reposed in his discretion.
He is labeled—“Safe.” He is to gaze on all these charms,
with a disinterested spirit, without a thought of personal
appropriation. Of course he is not to stand in the way of
eligible establishments that may offer, but meanwhile he
can make himself generally agreeable and useful. He may
advise the fair charmers as to their reading and superintend
the cultivation of their minds; he may be on hand
whenever an escort is needed to a party, he may brighten
up dull evenings by reading aloud, and in short may be
that useful individual that is looked on “quite as a brother,
you know.”

Young men who glide into this position in families,
generally, I believe, enjoy it quite as much as the moth-millers
who seem to derive such pleasure from the light
and heat of the evening lamp, and with somewhat similar
results. But though thousands of these unsophisticated
insects singe their wings every evening, the thousand-and-first
one comes to the charge with a light heart in his
bosom, and quite as satisfied of his good fortune as I was
when Mrs. Van Arsdel with the sweetest and most motherly
tones said to me, “I know, Mr. Henderson, the lonely life
you young men must lead when you first come to cities; you
have been accustomed to the home circle, to mother and
sisters, and it must be very dreary. Pray, make this a sort
of home; drop in at any time, our parlors are always open,
and some of us about; or if not, why, there are the pictures

and the books, you know, and there is the library where you
can write.”

Surely it was impossible for a young man to turn away
from all this allurement. It was the old classic story:—

Mrs. Van Arsdel, as I said, was one of three fair sisters
who had attained a great celebrity, in the small provincial
town where they were born, for their personal charms. They
were known far and near as the beautiful Miss Askotts.
Their father was a man rather in the lower walks of life, and
the fortunes of the family were made solely by the personal
attractions of the daughters.

The oldest of these, Maria Askott, married into one of the
so-called first New York families. The match was deemed
in the day of it a very brilliant one. Tom Wouverman was
rich, showy, and dissipated; and in a very few years ran
through both with his property and constitution, and left
his wife the task of maintaining a genteel standing on very
limited means.

The second sister, Ellen, married Mr. Van Arsdel when he
was in quite modest circumstances, and had been carried up
steadily by his business ability to the higher circles of New
York life. The third had married a rich Southern planter
whose fortunes have nothing to do with my story.

The Van Arsdel household, like most American families,
was substantially under feminine rule. Mr. Van Arsdel
was a quiet, silent man, whose whole soul was absorbed in
business, and who left to his wife the whole charge of all
that concerned the household and his children.

Mrs. Van Arsdel, however, was under the control of her
elder sister. There are born dictators as well as born poets.
Certain people come into the world with the instinct and
talent for ruling and teaching, and certain others with the
desire and instinct of being taught and ruled over. There
are people born with such a superfluous talent for management

and dictation that they always, instinctively and as
a matter of course, arrange not only their own affairs but
those of their friends and relations, in the most efficient
and complete manner possible. Such is the tendency of
things to adaptation and harmony, that where such persons
exist we are sure to find them surrounded by those who
take delight in being guided, who like to learn and to look
up. Such a domestic ruler was Mrs. Maria Wouverman,
commonly known in the Van Arsdel circle as “Aunt
Maria,” a name of might and authority anxiously interrogated
and quoted in all passages of family history.

Now the fact is quite striking that the persons who hold
this position in domestic policy are often not particularly
strong or wise. The governing mind of many a circle is not
by any means the mind best fitted either mentally or morally
to govern. It is neither the best nor the cleverest
individual of a given number who influences their opinions
and conduct, but the person the most perseveringly self-asserting.
It is amusing in looking at the world to see how
much people are taken at their own valuation. The persons
who always have an opinion on every possible subject ready
made, and put up and labeled for immediate use, concerning
which they have no shadow of a doubt or hesitation, are
from that very quality born rulers. This positiveness, and
preparedness, and readiness may spring from a universal
shallowness of nature, but it is none the less efficient. While
people of deeper perceptions and more insight are wavering
in delicate distresses, balancing testimony and praying for
light, this common-place obtuseness comes in and leads all
captive, by mere force of knowing exactly what it wants,
and being incapable of seeing beyond the issues of the
moment.

Mrs. Maria Wouverman was all this. She always believed
in herself, from the cradle. The watchwords of her conversation
were always of a positive nature. “To be sure,”
“certainly,” “of course,” “I see,” and “I told you so.”

Correspondingly to this, Mrs. Van Arsdel, her next sister,

was one who said habitually, “What would you do, and
how would you do it?” and so the domestic duet was complete.
Mrs. Wouverman did not succeed in governing or
reclaiming her husband, but she was none the less self-confident
for that; and having seen him comfortably into his
grave, she had nothing to do but get together the small
remains of the estate and devote herself to “dear Ellen
and her children.” Mrs. Wouverman managed her own
house, where everything was arranged with the strictest
attention and economy, and to the making a genteel appearance
on a small sum, and yet found abundance of time to
direct sister Ellen and her children.

She was a good natured, pleasant-mannered woman, fond
of her nieces and nephews; and her perfect faith in herself,
the decision of all her announcements, and the habitual
attitude of consultation in which the mother of the family
stood towards her, led the Van Arsdel children as they grew
up to consider “Aunt Maria,” like the Bible or civil government,
as one of the great ready-made facts of society, to
be accepted without dispute or injury.

Mrs. Wouverman had her own idea of the summum bonum,
that great obscure point about which philosophers have
groped in vain. Had Plato or Anaxagoras or any of those
ancient worthies appealed to her, she would have smiled on
them benignantly and said: “Why yes, of course, don't you
see? the thing is very simple. You must keep the best
society and make a good appearance.”

Mrs. Van Arsdel had been steadily guided by her in the
paths of fashionable progression. Having married into a
rich old family, Aunt Maria was believed to have mysterious
and incommunicable secrets of gentility at her command.
She was always supposed to have an early insight
into the secret counsels of that sublime, awful, mysterious
“they,” who give the law in fashionable life. “They don't
wear bonnets that way, now!' “My love, they wear gloves
sewed with colored silks, now!” or, “they have done with
hoops and flowing sleeves,” or, “they are beginning to wear

hoops again! They are going to wear long trains,” or, “they
have done with silver powder now!” All which announcements
were made with a calm solemnity of manner calculated
to impress the youthful mind with a sense of their
profound importance.

Mr. Van Arsdel followed Aunt Maria's lead with that
unquestioning meekness which is so edifying a trait in our
American gentlemen. In fact he considered the household
and all its works and ways as an insoluble mystery which
he was well pleased to leave to his wife; and if his wife
chose to be guided by “Maria” he had no objection. So
long as his business talent continued yearly to enlarge his
means of satisfying the desires and aspirations of his family,
so long he was content quietly and silently to ascend in the
scale of luxurious living, to have his house moved from
quarter to quarter until he reached a Fifth Avenue palace,
to fill it with pictures and statuary, of which he knew little
and cared less.

Under Aunt Maria's directions Mrs. Van Arsdel aspired to
be a leader in fashionable society. No house was to be so
attractive as her's, no parties so brilliant, no daughters in
greater demand. Nature had generously seconded her
desires. Her daughters were all gifted with fine personal
points as well as a more than common share of that spicy
genial originality of mind which is as a general thing rather
a characteristic of young American girls.

Mr. Van Arsdel had had his say about the education of his
sons and daughters. No expense had been spared. They
had been sent to the very best schools that money could
procure, and had improved their advantages. The consequences
of education had been as usual to increase the difficulties
of controlling the subject.

The horror and dismay of Mrs. Van Arsdel and of Aunt
Maria cannot be imagined when they discovered almost
immediately on the introduction of Ida Van Arsdel into
society that they had on their hands an actual specimen of
the strong minded young woman of the period; a person

who looked beyond shows, who did her own thinking,
and who despised or approved with full vigor without consulting
accepted standards, and was resolutely resolved not
to walk in the ways her pastors or masters had hitherto considered
the only appointed ones for young ladies of good
condition.

To work embroidery, go to parties, entertain idlers and
wait to be chosen in marriage, seemed to a girl who had
spent six years in earnest study a most lame and impotent
conclusion to all that effort; and when Ida Van Arsdel
declared her resolution to devote herself to professional
studies, Aunt Maria's indignation and disgust is not to be
described.

“So shocking and indelicate! For my part I can't imagine
how anybody can want to think on such subjects! I'm sure
it gives me a turn just to look into a work on physiology,
and all those dreadful pictures of what is inside of us! I
think the less we know about such subjects the better;
women were made to be wives and mothers, and not to
trouble their heads about such matters; and to think of
Ida, of all things, whose father is rich enough to keep her
like a princess whether she ever does a thing or not!
Why should she go into it? Why, Ida is not bad looking.
She is quite pretty, in fact; there are a dozen girls with
not half her advantages that have made good matches, but
it's no use talking to her. That girl is obstinate as the
everlasting hills, and her father backs her up in it. Well,
we must let her go, and take care of the others. Eva is my
god-child, and we must at any rate secure something for
her.” Something, meant of course a splendid establishment.

The time of my introduction into the family circle was a
critical one.

In the race for fashionable leadership Mrs. Van Arsdel had
one rival whose successes were as stimulating and as vexatious
to her as the good fortune of Mordecai the Jew was to
Haman in Old Testament times.

All her good fortune and successes were spoiled by the

good fortune and successes of another woman, who was sure
to be a little ahead of her in everything that she attempted;
and this was the more trying as this individual began life
with her, and was a sort of family connection.

In days of her youth there was one Polly Sanders, a remote
cousin of the Askotts, who was reputed a beauty by
some. Polly was what is called in New England “smart.”
She was one who never lost an opportunity, and, as the vulgar
saying is, could make every edge cut. Her charms were
far less than those of the Misses Askott, and she was in
far more straitened circumstances; but she went at the
problem of life in a sort of tooth-and-nail fashion, which
often is extremely successful. She worked first in a factory,
till she made a little money, with which she put herself
to school—acquired showy accomplishments, and went
up like a balloon; married a man with much the same
talent for getting along in the world as herself; went to
Paris and returned a traveled, accomplished woman, and
the pair set up for first society people in New York; and
to the infinite astonishment of Mrs. Wouverman, were
soon in a position to patronize her, and to run a race, neck
and neck, with the Van Arsdels.

What woman's Christian principles are adequate to support
her under such trials? Nothing ever impressed Aunt
Maria with such a sense of the evils of worldliness as Polly
Elmore's career. She was fond of speaking of her familiarly
as “Polly;” and recalling the time when she was only a factory-girl.
According to Aunt Maria, such grasping, unscrupulous
devotion to things seen and tempoporal, had
never been known in anybody as in the case of Polly.
Aunt Maria, of course, did not consider herself as worldly.
Nobody ever does. You do not, I presume, my dear madam.
When your minister preaches about worldly people, your
mind immediately reverts to the Joneses and the Simpsons
round the corner, and you rather wonder how they take it.
In the same manner Aunt Maria's eyes were always being
rolled up, and she was always in a shocked state at something

these dreadful, worldly, dressy Elmores were doing.
But still they went on from conquering to conquer. Mrs.
Elmore was a dashing leader of fashion—spoke French like
a book—was credibly reported to have skated with the
Emperor at the Bois de Boulogne—and, in short, there was
no saying what feathers she didn't wear in her cap.

The Van Arsdels no sooner did a thing than the Elmores
did more. The Van Arsdels had a house in Fifth Avenue;
the Elmores set up a French chateau on the Park. The Van
Arsdels piqued themselves on recherché society. The Elmores
made it a point to court all the literati and distinguished
people. Hence, rising young men were of great
value as ornaments to the salons of the respective houses—
if they had brought with them a name in the literary world,
so much the more was their value—it was important to
attach them to our salon, lest they should go to swell the
triumphs of the enemy.

The crowning, culminating triumph of the Elmores was
the engagement, just declared, of Maria, the eldest daughter,
to young Rivington, of Rivington Manor, concerning
which Aunt Maria and Mrs. Van Arsdel were greatly moved.

The engagement was declared, and brilliant wedding
preparations on foot that should eclipse all former New
York grandeurs; and what luminary was there in the Van
Arsdel horizon to draw attention to that quarter?

“Positively, Ellen,” said Aunt Maria, “the engagement
between Eva and Wat Sydney must come out. It provokes
me to see the absurd and indelicate airs the Elmores gives
themselves about this Rivington match. It's really in shocking
taste. I'm sure I don't envy them Sam Rivington.
There are shocking stories told about him. They say he is
a perfect roué—has been taken home by the police night
after night. How Polly, with all her worldliness, can make
such an utter sacrifice of her daughter is what I can't see.
Now Sydney everybody knows is a strictly correct man.
Ellen, this thing ought to come out.”

“But, dear me, Maria, Eva is such a strange child. She
won't admit that there is any engagement.”

“She must admit it, Ellen—of course she must. It's Ida
that puts her up to all her strange ideas, and will end by
making her as odd as she is herself. There's that new
young man, that Henderson—why don't we turn him to account?
Ida has taken a fancy to him, I hear, and it's exactly
the thing. Only get Ida's thoughts running that way
and she'll let Eva alone, and stop putting notions into her
head. Henderson is a gentleman, and would be a very
proper match for Ida. He is literary, and she is literary.
He is for all the modern ideas, and so is she. I'm sure,
I go with all my heart for encouraging him. It's exactly the
thing.”

And Aunt Maria

with a magnificence equal to Jupiter in the old Homeric
days.