There was grave anxiety for the morals of the whole nation. The city was growing too fast. By 1850 it had passed the half-million mark! The churches were not numerous enough to hold a quarter of the population, yet most of them were sparsely attended.
The American home was collapsing. Dr. Chirnside preached on the exalted cost of living, and stated that church weddings were on the decrease. The hotel was ruining the family. Rents were so exorbitant, servants so scarce and incompetent, that people were giving up the domesticity of the good old days.
Business detained the husband downtown, and he took his midday dinner at Sweeny’s or Delmonico’s, where he could have poultry or sirloin steak for a shilling and sixpence. And his wife and daughters, unwilling to eat alone, went to Weller’s or Taylor’s and had a fricandeau, an ice, or a meringue. Ladies’ saloons were numerous and magnificent and wives could buy ready-made meals there; so they forgot how to cook. The care of children no longer concerned them. Women were losing all the retiring charm that had hitherto given them their divine power over men.
The clergy bewailed the approaching collapse of a nation that had forgotten God—or had never remembered him. There was a movement afoot to amend the Constitution with an acknowledgment of the Deity and “take the stain of atheism from that all-important document.”
These were the Sunday thoughts.
In contrast were the Fourth of July thoughts, when the country sang its own hallelujahs and, like another deity, contentedly meditated its own perfections. On these occasions every American man was better than any foreigner, and American women were all saints.
And there were the Election Day moods, when the country split up into parties for a few weeks, and played tennis with mutual charges of corruption, thievery, treason. Then there was Christmas, when everybody loved everybody; and New Year’s Day, when everybody called on everybody and got a little drunk on good wishes and the toasts that went with them.
David RoBards had his personal seasons; his feast days and fast days in his own soul. Everybody treated him with respect as a man of unblemished life in a home of unsullied reputation.
Then Patty met him with a doleful word:
“We’ve got to give an At Home right away. Don’t stand staring! We’ve gone out dozens of times and accepted no end of hospitality. We simply must pay our debts.”