The Old Maid (The 'Fifties)

OLD NEW YORK
FALSE DAWN ( The ’Forties ) By EDITH WHARTON
( The ’Fifties ) BY EDITH WHARTON AUTHOR OF “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,” ETC. DECORATIONS BY E. C. CASWELL
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIV COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Copyright, 1922, by The Consolidated Magazines Corporation ( The Red Book Magazine ) PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA



IN the old New York of the ’fifties a few families ruled, in simplicity and affluence. Of these were the Ralstons.
The sturdy English and the rubicund and heavier Dutch had mingled to produce a prosperous, prudent and yet lavish society. To “do things handsomely” had always been a fundamental principle in this cautious world, built up on the fortunes of bankers, India merchants, shipbuilders and ship-chandlers. Those well-fed slow-moving people, who seemed irritable and dyspeptic to European eyes only because the caprices of the climate had stripped them of superfluous flesh, and strung their nerves a little tighter, lived in a genteel monotony of which the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underground. Sensitive souls in those days were like muted key-boards, on which Fate played without a sound.
In this compact society, built of solidly welded blocks, one of the largest areas was filled by the Ralstons and their ramifications. The Ralstons were of middle-class English stock. They had not come to the colonies to die for a creed but to live for a bank-account. The result had been beyond their hopes, and their religion was tinged by their success. An edulcorated Church of England which, under the conciliatory name of the “Episcopal Church of the United States of America, ” left out the coarser allusions in the Marriage Service, slid over the comminatory passages in the Athanasian Creed, and thought it more respectful to say “Our Father who ” than “ which ” in the Lord’s Prayer, was exactly suited to the spirit of compromise whereon the Ralstons had built themselves up. There was in all the tribe the same instinctive recoil from new religions as from unaccounted-for people. Institutional to the core, they represented the conservative element that holds new societies together as seaplants bind the seashore.