——
CHAPTER II.
Acquaintances Letty had none in the great city. Mrs. Jones, the lady of her husband’s partner, of course called upon her and gave her a party, to which her acquaintance generally were invited. Now, though Mrs. Jones and her friends belonged most strictly to the class called respectable and genteel, yet they were not fashionable. Letty appeared to comprehend this as it were by intuition. Nature had certainly intended her to be somebody—she accordingly took her line of conduct at once, and she determined that though circumstances required that with Mrs. Jones an air of cordiality and sociability must be preserved, yet this was not so necessary with that lady’s friends. Letty never cut any body directly. Her innate sense of propriety and natural good-breeding revolted from a course to which none but people of vulgar minds and shallow parts ever resort. She possessed, however, a tact which enabled her to drop an acquaintance without the slightest seemingness of rudeness or ill-manners. She knew how first to smile most cordially when she met the “droppee,” to wonder—
It was so long since they had met; she supposed, however, it must be her fault, but she had been so busy she had not been able to pay half her visits; to press the hand slightly, and with a smile an angel might almost envy, to say, “Good-bye, I will endeavor soon—”
And then glide gently away before the sentence was filled up. And this was the last of it. On the next meeting a sweet smile, a courteous bow, but no time to speak; and so the season passed; no visit exchanged, each eradicated the other’s name from her “list”—the object was effected not only without offense, but with such ease and grace, that the dropped was afterward heard to say:
“I think Mrs. A. a most lovely woman, and regret I was compelled by circumstances I could not help to stop visiting her, and so she has given me up.” Mrs. C. is not the only deluded mortal in this world.
Mrs. Smithson, we have seen, had determined that Mrs. Jones’s “set” were not to become her “set.” She was willing to bide her time. She was aware that great events are usually the creatures of slow growth. They may at the last grow with rapidity, but the seed which produces them has been for a long time germinating. She believed that a cultivated mind and accomplished person joined to a determined will, can achieve anything it pleases in the social as in other worlds, and she was determined to prove the truth of her convictions in her own case, and so she went on improving her mind, perfecting her accomplishments and biding her time.
Mr. Smithson, like all other reputable gentlemen, had, on becoming a married man, taken a pew in church. It was in a fashionable church, which then meant an Episcopal church, for fashion in those days was pretty much monopolized in Quakerdelphia by Episcopalians and a few degenerate descendants of the co-religionists of Penn, who had departed wofully in dress and manners from the primitive simplicity of “Friends.” Now-a-days things are somewhat altered, as one may perceive at a glance on entering some of the Presbyterian churches in the fashionable part of the city—the display of velvets, brocades and furs, the oceans of feathers and parterres of flowers show that their owners have entered on the race, and that it is almost a dead heat. Nor has the innovation ceased here. The full, rich, deep swell of the organ has been substituted for the bass-viol, and (rise not at the mention of it, shades of Knox and Calvin,) it is rumored that your descendants are about to worship in a Gothic temple, with its windows of stained-glass through which the “dim religious light” is to penetrate, and dim enough it is during our short winter afternoons. Whether the resemblance to the “Mass-houses” which were torn down in the sixteenth century is to be carried out fully in the interior as well as exterior, we have not learned, nor whether it is only to be confined to “sedilia,” “screen,” “south-porch,” “octagonal font at the door,” or whether any or none of these remains of Medievalism are to have a place within. The “Ecclesiologist” no doubt can enlighten our readers, and to that we refer them.
Mr. Smithson, as we said, took a pew in a fashionable church, and in a desirable position. Thither, accompanied by his fashionable-looking wife, who, in her turn, was accompanied by her richly-bound prayer-book, he resorted on Sunday mornings. The attention of the devotees around was at once attracted by her, and stray glances would slip from the leaf of the prayer-book to the “new person” near by. “N’importe,” Letty might say, as did a celebrated English dandy when an hundred opera-glasses were leveled at him, “Let them look and die.” With her attire no fault could be found. The material was of the richest and most costly kind, the colors most harmoniously combined; the fit perfect, showing her willowy and graceful figure to the utmost advantage, and the furs genuine martin.
“Who is she?” was the whispered colloquy, as the parties proceeded down the aisle, with a glance over the shoulder.