arranged marriages?"
"No, no, Dorothy could never be forced into anything. But she's terribly under her father's influence. She was brought up as an only child by one parent. Her half-brothers are much older and long married. She considers Daddy a kind of god."
"And how does she feel about you?"
"Oh, she likes me well enough. She always seems glad to see me, and she writes me when she goes off on trips with her old man. In fact she's too nice to me; that's one of my troubles. She treats me more as a pal than a beau."
"But she must know how you really feel?"
"Oh, yes!" Horace's face lit up with his sense of this. But at once it seemed to drop. "Only she brushes it off. She mutters about our being too young and not knowing our own mindsâthings her father has told her, no doubt."
"Puppy love?" I was sorry for the term when I saw the pain in his eyes.
"I daresay Mr. Stonor
would
call it that."
My parents were in England; Father was teaching for a term at Oxford, and Horace invited me for a weekend at his parents' house in New York. It was to be the occasion of my meeting the famous Dorothy. But first let me say something about his family.
They were certainly not rich by the standards of 1909; their brownstone with a stoop on East Fifty-sixth Street had only a three-window frontage, and a picture in the hall of their summer cottage in Maine showed an unpretentious shingle pile. But they kept five maids and hired a motor when needed, and Horace's father belonged to several clubs to which he rarely went. The interior of the brownstone, virgin to the reforming hands of Elsie de Wolfe and Elizabeth Marbury, was conventionally cluttered, though relics of the Federal period, mute emblems of the finer taste and greater affluence of an earlier generation, peeped out between trinket-filled
étagères
and bronze groups of animals in alarming combat. I recall in particular a lovely Aspinwall bride in marble, done in Rome on an 1840 honeymoon, and the miniature of a romantic youth with a grace and charm not unlike Horace's.
Mrs. Aspinwall was a small reserved woman, with lips that seemed always pursed and an air of mild benevolence ever ready to be withdrawn, who cosseted a supposedly frail health. I say "supposedly," though certainly none of her family ever doubted its frailty. Her confidence that the duties from which her weakened state exempted her would be performed by her husband and children was entirely justified in the fact.
Her husband was a large man with a larger stomach who might have been handsome enough as a youth, but who was now the product of physical inactivity (except for fishing), much eating and (I suspect) private drinking in the study where he spent most of his day. He had no occupation when I knew him except handling his and his wife's securities, though he had once served on a couple of railroad boards and even, according to a family legend, been kicked off that of Illinois Central for opposing Mr. Harriman. This was always cited by his children as an example of his courage and independence, but Gurdon, who saw his uncle with a less partial eye, told me that it had been simply a case of Uncle John's awakening from his usual snoozle at a directors' meeting and forgetting for once his role of rubber stamp.
Both he and his wife carried self-absorption to a high degree, but whereas she could at least turn her attention to a guest on a social occasion, he was almost incapable of taking in anything you tried to tell him and would fix a glassy eye on you until he had a chance (soon seized if not offered) to put in a story of his fishing or stock market acumen (the latter, again according to Gurdon, a total fiction). So removed was he from any sense of what people might notice that he must have believed that his noisy habit of scraping his molars with a toothpick behind his napkin went unobserved. Gurdon at Yale used to embarrass Horace by "doing Uncle John" for an irreverent group, throwing a towel over
Carol Ann Newsome, C.A. Newsome