About a year ago cards were sent out by Mr. Jay Gould, which read simply:
Mr. Jay Gould
and
Miss Gould
At Home
Saturday, Dec. 26, from 3 until 7.
As many as 3,000 of these were sent out, and every person in the social set was asked. This was nothing very unusual, as general invitations are frequently extended by people of personal prominence in this way. During the first couple of hours of the “at home” there were but few callers at the Gould house, but later they came in a steady stream.
The mothers of marriageable youths were very kindly disposed toward Miss Gould. Whether she was to achieve a social success has never yet been determined, for almost immediately after the coming out reception she left town with her father, who went away for his health. Social leaders say that with his great wealth Mr. Gould might easily have arranged for his daughter’s marriage to a man of great social rank. But Mr. Gould didn’t care to encourage the quest for his daughter’s hand on the part of men of great social rank. This was evidenced by the hearty consent he gave to the recent marriage of his son Edwin to Miss Shrady, the adopted daughter of Dr. Shrady.
When George J. Gould married Edith Kingdon, the actress, it was said there was opposition to it on the part of Mr. and Mrs. Gould, but if such was the case it never developed into anything definite. In fact the Goulds made much of their daughter-in-law when they came to know her. When Jay Gould became a grandfather he manifested the greatest interest in the children of his son. There are three of them at the present time.
Edwin Gould, the second son, takes after his father more than the other children in the matter of characteristics. He took a course at Columbia and rowed in the freshmen crew. As to how the elder Gould regarded the two boys, George and Edwin, an old financier, who knew Gould intimately, said:
“Either Jay Gould loves his sons George and Edwin to the point of indiscretion, or he has weighed them up in his keen way and thinks there’s a lot of sand in them.”
Mr. and Mrs. Gould were a couple happily married in the fullest sense of the term. Mr. Gould was exceedingly domestic in his tastes. He never cared much about going into society. His wife died some years ago.
Mrs. Gould had been fond of society, but gradually gave it up.
The pleasures of Jay Gould’s life were simple and few. With vast wealth at his command, he seldom sought recreation away from his immediate home. To a certain extent money-getting seemed to be a pleasure to him. In the many deals engineered by his master hand he felt the thrill of a nervy gambler who stakes his money on the turn of a card. It was not making money that worried him. It was keeping what he made and holding his own in the thousand and one schemes concocted to get the better of him.