The birthdays and wedding anniversaries of all were duly celebrated, and gifts interchanged at Christmas between both parents and children. It was indeed a happy, joyous circle of friends.
My business affairs continued to prosper, and for my second year, as an importer and dealer, my books showed a profit of sixty-eight thousand dollars.
CHAPTER XXIX
A SHORT YEAR AND A MERRY ONE
As memory carries me back to 1891, it seems as if it would have been impossible to crowd into a period of twelve months more social pleasures and jolly good times than we had in that year.
In the social life at Knollwood we had ceased to be active. We kept up and enjoyed our intimate friendship, now of more than ten years' duration, with our immediate neighbors; but the personnel of the Park had changed in recent years and with many of the new residents we were not congenial, though on pleasant terms with all.
There was still a good deal of dining, card parties, and entertainments at the Casino, in which we participated, but it was with our New York friends that most of our social life was passed. The circle there had been enlarged by the addition of many pleasant people, although the close intimacy still rested where it had started, with, however, the addition of Mr. and Mrs. William Viedler.
Mr. Viedler, a multi-millionaire at that time, has since largely increased his fortune and is now the controlling interest in a prominent trust of comparatively recent formation. They had been Brooklynites but bought a fine house on Fifth Avenue.
We first met them on the occasion of a dinner given in their honor by Mr. and Mrs. Curtice, to welcome them to New York. Mr. Curtice is a nephew of Mrs. Viedler.
The Caines, although intimate, were not of the inner circle. This comprised Mr. and Mrs. Curtice, Mr. and Mrs. Todd, Mr. and Mrs. Banford, Mr. and Mrs. Viedler, and ourselves. Curtice was our poet laureate, and in a song he composed and sang at a dinner were included these lines: