Chapter Chapter 3 · 第3章

AS a child she had promised to be tall, but when she was sixteen she

ceased to grow, and her stature, like most other points in her

composition, was not unusual. She was strong, however, and properly

made, and, fortunately, her health was excellent. It has been noted that

the Doctor was a philosopher, but I would not have answered for his

philosophy if the poor girl had proved a sickly and suffering person.

Her appearance of health constituted her principal claim to beauty, and

her clear, fresh complexion, in which white and red were very equally

distributed, was, indeed, an excellent thing to see. Her eye was small

and quiet, her features were rather thick, her tresses brown and smooth.

A dull, plain girl she was called by rigorous critics—a quiet, ladylike

girl by those of the more imaginative sort; but by neither class was she

very elaborately discussed. When it had been duly impressed upon her

that she was a young lady—it was a good while before she could believe

it—she suddenly developed a lively taste for dress: a lively taste is

quite the expression to use. I feel as if I ought to write it very

small, her judgement in this matter was by no means infallible; it was

liable to confusions and embarrassments. Her great indulgence of it was

really the desire of a rather inarticulate nature to manifest itself; she

sought to be eloquent in her garments, and to make up for her diffidence

of speech by a fine frankness of costume. But if she expressed herself

in her clothes it is certain that people were not to blame for not

thinking her a witty person. It must be added that though she had the

expectation of a fortune—Dr. Sloper for a long time had been making

twenty thousand dollars a year by his profession, and laying aside the

half of it—the amount of money at her disposal was not greater than the

allowance made to many poorer girls. In those days in New York there

were still a few altar-fires flickering in the temple of Republican

simplicity, and Dr. Sloper would have been glad to see his daughter

present herself, with a classic grace, as a priestess of this mild faith.

It made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his

should be both ugly and overdressed. For himself, he was fond of the

good things of life, and he made a considerable use of them; but he had a

dread of vulgarity, and even a theory that it was increasing in the

society that surrounded him. Moreover, the standard of luxury in the

United States thirty years ago was carried by no means so high as at

present, and Catherine’s clever father took the old-fashioned view of the

education of young persons. He had no particular theory on the subject;

it had scarcely as yet become a necessity of self-defence to have a

collection of theories. It simply appeared to him proper and reasonable

that a well-bred young woman should not carry half her fortune on her

back. Catherine’s back was a broad one, and would have carried a good

deal; but to the weight of the paternal displeasure she never ventured to

expose it, and our heroine was twenty years old before she treated

herself, for evening wear, to a red satin gown trimmed with gold fringe;

though this was an article which, for many years, she had coveted in

secret. It made her look, when she sported it, like a woman of thirty;

but oddly enough, in spite of her taste for fine clothes, she had not a

grain of coquetry, and her anxiety when she put them on was as to whether

they, and not she, would look well. It is a point on which history has

not been explicit, but the assumption is warrantable; it was in the royal

raiment just mentioned that she presented herself at a little

entertainment given by her aunt, Mrs. Almond. The girl was at this time

in her twenty-first year, and Mrs. Almond’s party was the beginning of

something very important.

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household

gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his

marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous

fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes’ walk of

the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view)

about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily

northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which

it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled

farther to the right and left of Broadway. By the time the Doctor

changed his residence the murmur of trade had become a mighty uproar,

which was music in the ears of all good citizens interested in the

commercial development, as they delighted to call it, of their fortunate

isle. Dr. Sloper’s interest in this phenomenon was only indirect—though,

seeing that, as the years went on, half his patients came to be

overworked men of business, it might have been more immediate—and when

most of his neighbours’ dwellings (also ornamented with granite copings

and large fanlights) had been converted into offices, warehouses, and

shipping agencies, and otherwise applied to the base uses of commerce, he

determined to look out for a quieter home. The ideal of quiet and of

genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the

Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big

balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps

ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This

structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were

supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural

science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings.

In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of

inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its

rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august

precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a

spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I

know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but

this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It

has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in

other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more

honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great

longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social

history. It was here, as you might have been informed on good authority,

that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of

sources of interest; it was here that your grandmother lived, in

venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself

alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that

you took your first walks abroad, following the nursery-maid with unequal

step and sniffing up the strange odour of the ailantus-trees which at

that time formed the principal umbrage of the Square, and diffused an

aroma that you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved; it

was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed,

broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue

cup, with a saucer that didn’t match, enlarged the circle both of your

observations and your sensations. It was here, at any rate, that my

heroine spent many years of her life; which is my excuse for this

topographical parenthesis.

Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a

high number—a region where the extension of the city began to assume a

theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was

one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch

houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter.

These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New

York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of

middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of

them. Catherine had a great many cousins, and with her Aunt Almond’s

children, who ended by being nine in number, she lived on terms of

considerable intimacy. When she was younger they had been rather afraid

of her; she was believed, as the phrase is, to be highly educated, and a

person who lived in the intimacy of their Aunt Penniman had something of

reflected grandeur. Mrs. Penniman, among the little Almonds, was an

object of more admiration than sympathy. Her manners were strange and

formidable, and her mourning robes—she dressed in black for twenty years

after her husband’s death, and then suddenly appeared one morning with

pink roses in her cap—were complicated in odd, unexpected places with

buckles, bugles, and pins, which discouraged familiarity. She took

children too hard, both for good and for evil, and had an oppressive air

of expecting subtle things of them, so that going to see her was a good

deal like being taken to church and made to sit in a front pew. It was

discovered after a while, however, that Aunt Penniman was but an accident

in Catherine’s existence, and not a part of its essence, and that when

the girl came to spend a Saturday with her cousins, she was available for

“follow-my-master,” and even for leapfrog. On this basis an

understanding was easily arrived at, and for several years Catherine

fraternised with her young kinsmen. I say young kinsmen, because seven

of the little Almonds were boys, and Catherine had a preference for those

games which are most conveniently played in trousers. By degrees,

however, the little Almonds’ trousers began to lengthen, and the wearers

to disperse and settle themselves in life. The elder children were older

than Catherine, and the boys were sent to college or placed in

counting-rooms. Of the girls, one married very punctually, and the other

as punctually became engaged. It was to celebrate this latter event that

Mrs. Almond gave the little party I have mentioned. Her daughter was to

marry a stout young stockbroker, a boy of twenty; it was thought a very

good thing.