Miss Dividends: A Novel

by Archibald Clavering Gunter

There was only one trouble in all their family affairs, and that was removed by the settlement Mr. Travenion had made upon Ollie's fiancée, for as such Mrs. Livingston already regarded Erma. In order to make the settlement upon his son, the elder Livingston had culled his best securities and most gilded collaterals; those left for the support of his widow and daughter, not being so stable, had depreciated in the last few years, and Mrs. Livingston's income had dwindled until it was not what she considered it should be for a lady of her station. Now, of course, if Ollie married a very rich wife, he could be very liberal to his mother and sister, and that point had been happily settled by the million-dollar settlement upon Miss Travenion.

It is some thought of this that is in Erma's mind once or twice in her first day's journey towards the West. The girl loves Mrs. Livingston, who had been a companion of Erma's mother, and had been very kind to the child even after her father's reverses, and had frequently visited Miss Hines' Academy in Gramercy Park, and had the little Erma, now wholly orphaned by her mother's death and father's absence, to her great house on Madison Square, where she had been regaled en princess and sent back to the boarding school made happy with good things to eat and presents that make children's hearts glad.

This, Miss Travenion does not forget, now that her father's settlements upon her have made her probably as great an heiress in her own right as any girl of her circle in Manhattan society.

This peculiar position of Mrs. Livingston had been pretty well known to Erma, and it seemed to compel her to make no protest when the widow had taken her from the seclusion of Miss Hines' Academy at the beginning of the winter and brought her out, with much blowing of social trumpets and flowers and fiddling at Mrs. Livingston's Madison Square mansion—and also had chaperoned her at Newport.

Therefore, she has rather grown to consider herself set apart for Oliver's wife, and as such has turned a deaf ear to the many men who, on slight encouragement, would be more than happy and more than ready to woo a young lady who has gorgeous beauty, a million of dollars of her own and a father of indefinite Western wealth, which, magnified by distance, has increased to such Monte Cristo proportions, that it has gained for her the title, among her set, of "Miss Dividends."

Besides any notion of gratitude to Mrs. Livingston, Erma knows that this match with Ollie is her father's wish. On one of his visits to New York, she had once hinted her desire to visit and live with him in the West, and had been promptly refused in terms as stern as Ralph Travenion could bring himself to use to his daughter, for whom he seemed to have a very tender love, and in doing so he had indicated that his wishes were that she fulfil the arrangement he had made with his old-time friend, the elder Livingston.

"Marry Oliver," he had said. "He is in your rank—the position to which you were born, Erma. Live in the East. The West is, perhaps, the best place to make money, but New York is par excellence the place to enjoy it. Some day—perhaps sooner than you expect, I shall join you here, and settle down to my old life as club man again," and Ralph Travenion looks towards the Unity Club, upon whose lists his name still stands, and of whose smoking-room he is still an habitué on his visits to Manhattan, rather longingly from his parlor in the Brevoort House, at which hotel he always stopped, in contradistinction to most of his comrades from the Plains, who are more apt to register at the Fifth Avenue or the Hoffman.

It was on one of these visits at the Brevoort that Erma had chanced to meet Mr. Lot Kruger, and circumstances compelling the same, had received introduction to him.

"Ha! a new convert to Zion!" the Westerner had cried out, looking rather curiously at the beautiful girl of nineteen, who had entered unannounced into Ralph Travenion's apartments.

But her father had simply said: "My daughter, Miss Erma, let me present Mr. Kruger, a business associate of mine," and had so dismissed the affair, though several times afterward the Westerner had chanced to be at Travenion's apartments when Erma called, and once or twice he had appeared at Miss Hines' Academy, bearer, as he said, of news from her father to Miss Travenion, to the amusement, astonishment and giggles of her fellow-pupils and the dismay of the schoolmistress, who thought Mr. Kruger a species of Western border ruffian or bandit.