She was much shocked when I remarked, “I hope it is a strong ship.”
Dr. Samuel Cabot’s house was always a revelation to me. It was full of stuffed birds in glass cases. He was not without a sense of the ridiculous, however, for when he was persuaded to go to see a picture by his brother Edward (whom all the women worshiped for his artistic tendencies), he said about this painting—entitled “Peace”—of two birds building their nest in the mouth of a cannon:
“That’s just like Edward; both his birds are male.”
This desire of ignoring sex was paramount in many learned and otherwise delightful folk. I remember William Ware and had great respect for him, but I had to laugh at him. He was an architect of ability and a professor at Columbia, loved by his pupils, but the kind of man who had no respect for any idea that was not fifty years old—so that it was certain to be absolutely true before he taught it. He told me once that he had never been able to see any reason for women’s existence. It must have been this side of his nature which caused him to go about with a small hammer and eliminate all evidences of sex from the newly arrived Greek masterpieces for the Boston Art Museum. He could not see anything incongruous in the fact that the fig leaves (cast by the workman in the Museum) were of a different color from the statues. Strange type of mind—and yet he had cleverness and a certain wit. My aunt had asked her husband to invite Professor Ware to dinner, but, thinking my uncle might forget the message, wrote a letter in addition. The professor answered both. The letters are records of brevity.
Dear Sophy: Yours with pleasure, W. W.
Dear James: Yours as to your wife, W. W.
Chapter XIII: The Players
The mad progress of Big Business can almost be likened to a mighty cyclone which sweeps across the countryside with destruction in its wake, but here and there leaving, quite untouched, a farm, a fruit tree, or a windmill—delightful oases—which serve as the only record of a struggling civilization. Big Business in New York has wiped out the homes of the people and sent them in a frantic rush hither and thither in search of a place to live. Always there is that uprooting, due to the steady march of the threatening skyscraper up the island of Manhattan. As in the case of the cyclone, however, verdant places are left behind in this barren desert of commerce, little green spots which remain an eternal blessing and evidence that there were once normal human beings here who thought and had time to care for beauty. One such place is Gramercy Park.
I started one day to try to guess the origin of the name “Gramercy.” Samuel Ruggles, the son of the maker of the park, told me that when his father had bought the land the squatters called it “Grommercy Crick” (there was then a small stream of water flowing through it) and the only word that sounded near enough to that was “Gramercy.” I asked Carl Arendt, a well-known actor, what Grommercy meant in Dutch. At first he said, “Nothing,” but later stopped me and said:
“You may have been aiming at Kromme Zee, which means Crooked Creek.”