Among the flowery kirtled Naïdes."
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.