“And it is well for them they are so,” observed another American, who, I understood, was a gentleman established in New York; “for they are not treated with nearly the same respect as ours.”
“If by respect you mean external attention,” rejoined the doctor, “and more especially exemption from labour and personal exertion, you are certainly right as far as regards your city women of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, &c. Our London women of the middle and even higher classes can walk alone, stand alone, and, when taking tea or coffee, do not require a gentleman to hold the saucer for them. Whenever they require an attendance of this sort, they hire it; and, until they can afford paying a page, manage to dispense with his services.”
“Excellent Englishwomen!” cried the third American, who happened to be a Boston lawyer, and a great admirer of England. “Would to Heaven our Yankee women were like yours! I do not mean to cast a reflection on the high moral qualities of our ladies; for I believe that, in regard to virtue, they can challenge the world for a comparison. I speak of the excessive pretensions and fastidious conduct, not only of our rich fashionable women, but also of the wives and daughters of our men of moderate fortune. No sooner do they find out that their husbands or fathers have laid up a couple of thousand dollars in a bank, than they set up for ladies of the ton; and then they want to ride in their own carriages; live in houses for which they pay from eight hundred to a thousand dollars’ rent; give parties to which they invite people whom they never met before, and from which they exclude their friends and nearest relations, in order not to be shamed by their presence; rake up a relationship with some colonel in the revolutionary army, or some noble family in Europe,—the latter is by far the most respectable; hang up the portraits of their ancestors in their parlours; make the tour of the springs in the summer; and spend a winter in Washington. Waste becomes now the order of the day; and if, in spite of their scrambling after fashionable society, they do not obtain access to the very first of it, the men are teased and tormented until they leave their native city to seek in one of the numerous ‘growing places’ of the West an asylum in which they cannot be outdone by the old families.”
“Our Yankee moralist is right,” exclaimed the New-Yorker; “nothing can be more contemptible than the endless pretensions of our parvenus.”
“If you speak in this manner,” rejoined the Boston lawyer, bestowing a knowing glance on the New-Yorker, “you pronounce sentence on nine-tenths of our industrious citizens. What great difference, after all, is there between a parvenu of ten years’ standing, and a parvenu who is just making his début in society? I have nothing to say against those who by perseverance and success in business have acquired fortunes that enable them to live in a style superior to that of their neighbours; but there is a way of playing the bourgeois gentilhomme which exposes a man deservedly to ridicule.”
“Like Mr. *** the grocer, who has just turned India merchant, and who will crowd his rooms with the most costly furniture, in such a manner that you cannot pass from one into the other without running against a table, a sofa, or a piano.”
“Or like Mrs. ***, the wife of the iron-monger, who has taken it into her head to patronize the arts, and has overhung the nice clean walls of her parlour with all the dirty daubs her husband has bought on his late tour through Italy.”
“Or like Mrs. *** of Philadelphia, the wife of the auctioneer, whose bals costumés are said to rival those of London and Paris, and whose husband gives to his male friends ‘a treat’ once a fortnight.”
“Or like those poor devils who live ‘all in a row’ in the West-end of our city without ever seeing one another, each expecting to be in due time admitted into fashionable society on paying the penalty of a party.”
“To which none but the gentlemen come.”