New Yorkers and other people,

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i£x ICthrts

SEYMOUR DURST

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Contents

PAGE

The New Yorkers, i

In Clinton Place, 77

Part I

I WAS brought out at seventeen, for the reason that my mother, an abnormally ambitious and adaptive woman, regarding a daughter as merely a means to an end, could wait no longer for the essay which should test my worldly value. I had had a grandfather, a man of neither repute nor wealth, and who therefore was never resurrected save behind the backs of his descendants, and by their social enemies. I had had also a father, a man of no repute and great wealth, which latter sanctified him somewhat, and permitted my mother the leisures and pleasures of an almost unbounded aplomb and daring.

Having been brought out, after the processes of two fashionable schools had done their level worst for me (and in the way of 3 obtaining knowledge, principally undesirable and unsuspected, these establishments, judging at least by their young inmates, can be guaranteed to take the palm), I was launched at a very stunning tea, and chronicled as a " most interesting and accomplished girl."

Thereupon I fell flat.

Notwithstanding all the counsels of my mother, all her lavish expenditure, all her forcing and admonitions, I remained, at the end of my third season, a social failure of the deepest dye, and to her a grievous mortification.

I neither rode recklessly, flirted desperately, carried clothes imperially, turned men's heads, broke their hearts, sang divinely, athletized, literatized, antagonized, nor hypnotized. I neither became a fiancee nor a wife. Earls, a prince or two, counts, baronets, and marquises passed before me, or, rather, I passed before them, and with all my millions, they evinced no disposition to appropriate me and mine.

To say that my mother was chagrined is to draw the picture of her mind most mildly. 4

With the inverse rebound of revolutionary antecedents, she yearned, in her generation, for a return to first principles, and the yoke of the title was one to which she longed to harness her daughter. In point of fact, this craze for me to marry a nobleman was the ruling passion of my mother's life, and to it she was ready to sacrifice not only me — which is a common enough form of immolation— but herself as well.

It can be imagined, then, that when at rising twenty, no man of any noble, or ignoble birth either, had even breathed of love, setting aside marriage, to me ; when I was pale, inert, big-eyed, dull-haired, nondescript, and handicapped with that awfulest of dowers, the pass in a crowd " atmosphere ; with no redemption visible anywhere about me to mortal eye (except the millions) — my mother— clever, ingenious, charming, world-wise — regarded her only offspring with horror.

The post-Easter season was drawing to a close. I stood in Mrs. Paulding's drawing-room ; perhaps I was listening to the music, but more to the voice of the man who stood near me. I felt my mother's eyes scanning 5 me with hopeless discontent at the way I disgraced a toilette fit for an empress. Possibly I felt more keenly the glances of the man ; his name was Jack Bingham, and he was saying :

" Yes, Miss Grey, I am going away on Saturday. It is useless for me to stop here and make a fool of myself any longer, you know, and if I put the pond between me and — temptation " — he hesitates a bit as he squares around and looks full into my stupid face — " I may man it in time. Hard work, they say, kills sometimes ; but I take it, it's slow murder ! "

Crash comes the music, cutting Jack Bingham's sigh in two. I don't look up. Why should I ? I am not so idiotic but that I feel the pulse in his voice and know that it is beating for some other woman who has not favored him. Why should I, a failure myself, give greeting or sympathy to another's misfortunes, poured into my ears because I happened to be nearest at hand in time of stress ?

" Well ? " he says, interrogatively, as the instruments quiet down a bit into a scherzo. 6

" Well," I echo, shrugging my shoulders.

" Can't you say a single word to me? " he asks, impatiently.

What shall I say ? " I answer, vaguely surmising that if I were he, I should win the woman, or at least die trying.

** Oh, nothing but good-by. I sail on Saturday. After this our paths are not likely ever to cross. I am going to plunge into Bohemian London for capital for a new novel. You " He puts out his hand.

I put out mine ; he holds it in his ; he is gone. What went with him? Surely you know.

I slipped back into a little room shrouded in portieres and palms, with dim lights, and sank into a seat, my arms full of emptiness, worse than the dullard sloughs of all my yesterdays.

Presently I heard my mother's well-modulated voice. She said, off yonder in the lighter part of the room :

" Candidly, Mr. McAllister, what do you think of her? That she is hopeless, I suppose ? Her third season over, and no country girl more irretrievably — oh ! I don't 7 know ! " A flutter of a fan, a tiny snap, a sigh. Why should a daughter of mine be such a girl ? "

Christie's a nice girl," began Mr. Mc- Allister, soothingly, " a very nice girl, I'm sure."

Nice ! " exclaimed my mother with a groan, and I had hoped so much for her. I feel disgraced, humiliated, mortified ! "

Oh, come now, my dear Mrs. Grey, if Miss Christie were my daughter, I assure you, I should not feel like this ; 'pon my soul I should not! I was observing her only a moment since with Bingham at her side, that clever, odd, writing fellow, don't you know?"

" Well, what did you observe about her ? Is there anything that I can do with her that I have not done? Pray, pray advise me."

" Well, you see, Miss Christie's the sort of girl that needs the lash ! "

The what? " cried my mother, aghast. " Yes, the lash, I said. If by any chance she could love someone and not be loved by him in return, don't you know, it would re- 8 veal her. As it is, she is a sealed book to herself even."

Oh," gasps my mother, irritably. " Love and Christie are as far apart as the poles. I don't believe she could love. Tell me something practical, tell me something that I can do to further her, can't you ? "

I suppose Mr. McAllister shrugs his shoulders ; his voice sounds as if he did as he says : Send her to Lady Heathcote." Who is Lady Heathcote ? "

" She is the principal and founder of a school of applied art, in Warwickshire, England."

" ' Applied art ' ! " exclaims my mother, almost hysterically. You would have me make a painter of her, and she has not sense enough to rouge her cheeks when they are too pale ! "

Mr. McAllister laughs.

" My dear Mrs. Grey, you mistake me entirely. I will send you Lady Heathcote's prospectus to-morrow and you can judge for yourself then ; only, one thing must be pledged, the pamphlet must go no farther, and its contents must be regarded as sacred." 9

" Surely," assents my mother. It was merely loaned me as a social curio, and as an indication of the trend of the moment. It may be regarded as a dangerous experiment, but you may care to try it."

" Anything, anything to make Christie like other girls, or a little like me. You see, I have an instinct that she has the capacity somewhere dormant in her, but she lacks inclination; lacks the expressive power. I know," my mother's voice is firm, that no child of mine could be, and not have such and such abilities, such and such ambitions, aspirations. All they need is to be brought out."

" That being the case," says Mr. McAllister, you have everything to hope, I suspect, from Lady Heathcote. Her mission is to discover young women and exploit them to their own and their parents' ultimate satisfaction."

I have apathetically acquiesced in being placed with Lady Heathcote at Harrowden- Burleigh, a pretty seat not far from such well-known places as Warwick and Leamington. A big brick and stone house of the

lO seventeenth century, ivy-grown and turreted, with ideal rooms and emerald lawns, a delicious garden where the Avon winds, and altogether quite the atmosphere to inspire a liking for the British side of life and a certain fair ease which I have not yet found so well equalized anywhere else. Such were the outward forms of this solecism, which Mr. McAllister in a happy moment had christened, A School of Applied Art ; " as for the inner workings and the people, they made a little world of a dozen souls (I suppose) in as many bodies.

Coming down from London to Leamington (which was the station for Harrowden- Burleigh) with my mother and my maid, I had vaguely recalled the mention of the " lash " which, selon lui, my mother's friend had thought I needed. I smiled as I, of course, remembered in this connection the face of Jack Bingham. I did not quite see the value of the remark in my especial case, for it is one of my creeds that to be sought is the seed of a woman's love, and speaking personally, not generally, I cannot fancy a girl caring for anyone minus the necessary II fact of his first caring for her. So, you see, I smile, pondering a little over the possibilities of my new entourage.

Lady Heathcote is large, suave, commanding, supple, for all her avoirdupois, with lidless lynx eyes and a tongue of honey ; an infinitude of tact, an ocean of perceptiveness, any amount of brutality, and the aplomb of the skirt-dancer. Du reste, she is well born, well bred, excellently cultivated, up in all things, keen, with positive love for her strange metier — this last not surprising, since she had found it to the greatest degree profitable.

There were ten other guests (at twenty pounds a week) at Harrowden-Burleigh when I came, some of them hopeless, some of them brimming with expectation, a few vulgar, the remainder tolerably conventional.

Lady Heathcote began by dismissing my maid, and supplying me with a person perfectly qualified to touch up my brown hair and my complexion. I let her do both.

The humor of the whole situation, including my mother's almost feverish adjurations when she parted from me to return to Nice for the winter, as to " obeying Lady Heathcote to the letter," struck me so forcibly and with such efficient novelty that I threw myself into it much as if it had been a bath of milk and roses. Whatever my own belief might be as to the outcome of these six months under Lady Heathcote's fostering care, I plunged into it without reservation, enjoying my own sensations with a certain peculiar relish.

The code was a rigid one ; it left no corner unturned, no page unread, no depth unsounded, either physically, mentally, or — I had almost said morally, but with the third in the terrestrial equilibrium of the art of living Lady Heathcote did not occupy herself or her pupils too much.

I came out of my room tinted and improved with brushes and dyes, although there was no one specially to look at me, but it was urged that I must submit to this now, in order that my nature might become accustomed to it by the time, when, equipped au bout des angles, I should emerge from Harrowden-Burleigh and secure my parti 13

To secure a parti was the acme of Lady Heathcote's scheme: to this end all means subserved. It was her belief that the raw material mattered but little, and she frankly avowed that she argued from her own experience.

I," said Lady Heathcote, " had neither beauty, distinction, an overplus of brains, nor fortuitous circumstances to insure my success, but I had that infallible instinct wdiich urged me to make the most of myself ; an instinct dormant in many women, which merely requires to be awakened in order to accomplish its ends."

Our weeks were weeks of routine, but to me the delicious, excruciating sarcasm of the whole affair rendered them periods of epicurean enjoyment. I abandoned myself to the regime much as, I dare say, the opiumsmoker gives himself up to his pipe, with the added zest of holding the reins on my own intellect all the while, and revelling in the brilliant Satanic, sardonic end-of-thecentury-ism of it all.

The day began, instructively speaking, with showing us how to walk, to enter a 14 room on different occasions, as for a ball, a reception, a tea, a funeral, a morning call ; how to leave it under these same circumstances ; how to get in a carriage, and to get out. This feat was performed in the solemn seclusion of the stable-yard with the attendant properties of coach and footman. Lady Heathcote standing surveying us, as each in turn merited her approbation or her frowns. How to behave under a series of circumstances of all kinds too numerous to mention ; how to be dressed, and how not to be ; how to treat inferiors, superiors, equals, friends, foes ; how to dance, and how not to ; how to approach the brink of risk, without tumbling over ; how to attract the attention of men — never how not to ! — how to pour tea, how to eat and to drink.

These were but a few of our daily phases of instruction, but the points upon which Lady Heathcote most insisted were Conversation, Pose, Balance, Reserve, and Love.

On these subjects she gave us little fiveminute lectures of a most edifying nature, which were followed by as much discussion as our intellectual staff would permit. 15

" In Conversation," Lady Heathcote told us, nothing is impossible, or unmentionable. A woman of to-day, to succeed, must be able to converse on politics, religion, atheism, occultism, temperance, suffrage, divorce, education, slums, social reform, the relations and equalities of the sexes, literature, especially fiction ; plays, music-halls, characterless women, and topics of all kinds where reputation is an unknown quantity."

As for Pose, she would have had us believe that its results are enormous, telling us that while it was only necessary to appear interested at times, it was imperative that we should always be picturesque, with a suspicion of suggestiveness ; that the pose should convey a tacit a:ssentive admiration for the predilections of the nearest man, if he were eligible, and that with all its cspieglerie, there should always exist a certain deference to him, as man.

I remarked here one day that I called that sort of thing deceit, if not worse.

Lady Heathcote smiled. My dear," she replied, your language lacks varnish ; it is i6 sexual conciliation," and blandly proceeded on her way.

" Balance," she explained, " is the equipoise born of experience," and this equipoise she revealed as " the result of a perfect acquaintance with all things, no matter what."

" But some things are unfit, indecent," I said, flushing and shame-faced.

Lady Heathcote again smiled. " My dear Miss Grey, the ethics of modern civilization have left nothing indecent. Everything must be known, handled, and criticised. In order to arrive at a correct valuation of one's self, one must dig up the earth as well as telescope the heavens. In order to battle with one's tendencies, one must discover them."

" Reserve " Lady Heathcote defined as " an assumption conceded to tradition, and useful in bringing down the game. Man is by nature a hunter, a pursuer; so much we must concede to what we cannot overcome, and in deference to this fact, woman, in dealing with him, employs the weapon of reserve, and a most useful one it is, too." 17

I turned off in disgust to a window.

" Has all your training but one goal, Lady Heathcote?" I cry; "a man to be captured?"

" Since Eve, who left Adam no choice, there being no other woman then in existence, my dear child, the aim of every wellordered feminine mind, is that which you are pleased to designate so coarsely."

I laugh. The ironical sweetness of Lady Heathcote's application of coarseness " strikes me as delightfully funny.

" I suppose, then," I say, that reserve is the only recognition necessary of man's inherent nature ; otherwise sex is an unconsidered distinction, minus even a difference ? "

" Sex is not in it. Miss Grey. Literature, art, science, recognize no such thing; it is one of the happy eliminations of the nineteenth century, that squeamishness of gender has ceased to affect our modern life. True, we have not been able to eradicate it from the principles which tend to the population of the world, but that is neither here nor there."

i8

" No — only everywhere," I murmur under my breath.

" Love — " Lady Heathcote turned her lorgnette upon us all as we lounged about the big hall in easy-chairs and sofas that morning —

Love, mes amies, is usually either an unknown quantity, or it is taken too seriously. One-half the world will never learn its alphabet; one-quarter is submerged by its whelm ; while the remaining quarter enjoys it from one end of its moody gamut to the other. It is my aim that you should, one and all, belong to this last class. In order to do so, two things must be eradicated; what is called naturalness and what is called unconsciousness. Both are foolish, well enough for peasants, and for poets to rhyme about, but for women of the world, useless. Self-consciousness is the open sesame to power over men and over occasions ; the unconscious woman never arrives. Art, as differentiated from naturalness, is the key to getting there, especially in love. You must remember, too, that to love once is archaic and a positive negligence of one's 19 opportunities ; it is the man or woman who loves often and with a self-conscious enjoyment of each successive phase, who derives the most from this possibiHty. Now, I want you all to leave me, knowing your own powers, your own capacities, equipped to obtain the greatest possible amount of success in your different paths. I have, therefore, decided to make an innovation ; I had engaged the services of Air. Claude Linton, of the Haymarket Theatre. Unfortunately, a despatch, received a few moments ago only, tells me he is too ill to fulfil his promise to me for to-day, but he is sending an adequate representative, he assures me, in the person of Mr. Beresford Clyde, of the Lyceum, I think, who will soon be with us."

" How delightful ! " I exclaimed, ironically. What does he come for? "

" To propose to you. Miss Grey, and to the others," adds her ladyship, with a smile.

In short, I have prepared a little role or code, which I sent up to town to Mr. Linton to study ; the role of a man in love and proposing. This part Mr. Clyde will enact 20 successively with each of you, beginning with Miss Grey."

" But my role ? " I interrupted with heat and amusement.

I leave that to your ingenuity. I will sit yonder. I wish to see what you will each do under the circumstances ; afterward I will point out your errors."

The quintessence of fin-de-siecle-ism! " cry I. This is surely the last day, the last hour of the poor nineteenth century ; " and thereupon carriage-wheels crunch the gravel, and we are warned of the arrival of Mr. Beresford Clyde.

It may be supposed that life at Harrowden-Burleigh was monotonous; it was far from it. We saw numbers of people of all sorts, in Lady Heathcote's circle of country acquaintance. She was known to have classes," but in what, remained a mystery, masquerading under the convenient cognomen of " Literature ; " and as her pupils, we moved about, hither and yon, with as much ease as each was mistress of. We went up to London for all the worst plays, for all the picture shows ; we read all the worst books, and we had no end of exercise on horses, 'mobes, and wheels. About the whole house there was an atmosphere of benignant insincerity, so to speak, and purposeless intention, which, while it awed some of us, yet soothed ; and to me was a never-failing source of entertainment.

The announcement, then, of the proposal " lesson could not fail to strike my sense of the ludicrous. I was filled with merriment as Lady Heathcote, after a preliminary chat with the anxious lover, ushered me into his presence, and introduced to me Mr. Beresford Clyde."

Jack Bingham stood before me.

I stood before him.

The door-bell rang (the goddess of mercy must have guided the ringer's hand), and Lady Heathcote was called out of the room for a few moments.

" And you are here ! " he says, a little wildly.

''And you also?" I answer, with calmness.

" As a matter of pure deviltry, I assure you. Linton is ill ; had told me something of this place as an actual and a remarkable spot, offered to have me come in his place, for the sport and the curiosity of the thing, and I accepted, under an assumed name and a pledge of secrecy. You know all."

I shrug my shoulders.

" And you," he says, aghast, " you are not here of your own free will ? "

" Surely," I say, " why not? " I look at him, I laugh ; it is a bewitching little laugh, and I know it.

What else do I know ? I know that I am what Lady Heathcote would call arriving ; " that self-consciousness, thenceforth and forevermore, must dominate my being and bring to me what my preceptress says it will — or something else.

As I laugh. Jack Bingham gazes at me in blank amazement. I daresay he never supposed I should learn such syren notes — and Lady Heathcote returns. She pauses, listens, looks, says :

** My dear Miss Grey, you are arriving; pray proceed. See, I will sit here. How far had you gotten, Mr. Clyde ? " picking up a MS. from the table.

Jack Bingham seemed dazed and there is a tiny pause — oh so tiny, because I answer airily for him.

" Lady Heathcote, dear, only so far as the third speech for Mr. Clyde ; pray give him the cue for the fourth. You see he has had little or no time to prepare for the — er — lesson."

Lady Heathcote does as she is requested, the proposal proceeds, takes place, is refused. I so work out my role, and Lady Heathcote is simply wild over my success.

After Mr. Clyde has gone to meet his train, she confesses that he was a " very poor hand at the business in the beginning with Miss Grey, but worked into it better at the end with little Miss Callowby." I hope he did.

As I have said, we went up to London very often; and only a week after the visit of Mr. Beresford Clyde we found ourselves at Burlington House contemplating some examples of the nude, and discussing the same with all the sangfroid of genuine Boulevardiercs. I was close to the rail and unabashed, the crowd pressing me and our 24 chaperon. Someway, since I had discovered myself that day last week in the proposal lesson, I had become reckless, with what Lady Heathcote calls the " joyous recklessness of one who does a thing with all his wits primed and with knowledge of compunction and yet disdaining it."

She was pointing out the beauty of the woman's arms in the painting, when I turned. Jack Bingham's eyes and mine met, his just returning from their excursion to the nude picture, mine ditto; the man flushed ; I don't know whether the girl did or not — under the pink powder it was hard to tell. Without a word he turned off as if he had been shot, linking his arm in that of the man who was his companion.

Lady Heathcote had not seen him. Presently, when we were all sitting on the divans discussing The Second Mrs. Tanqueray " con amore, she espied him and his friend.

" There is Hardy ! " she cries, and that young actor who came down to Harrowden last week in Linton's stead, is with him."

Some of us craned our necks to see the artist-author, some of us did not.

Apropos," continues Lady Heathcote. " What could be more charming than to speak of * Tess ' while watching her author. You have all read ' Tess,' I will not insult your intelligence by an interrogation point."

" I never have," I remarked, bluntly.

" My love ! " Lady Heathcote and my fellow-pupils all turn startled eyes upon me.

Then you will listen while we chat about the delightful creature, and I will buy you a copy before we go home."

I don't care to read it," I say, languidly. " I know enough of it to suffice me."

" If you knovv enough of * Tess,' then, Miss Grey, give us your opinion of it," says her ladyship, sharply.

I answer, " I call the book (granting, too, the genius, power, worth, and beauty of it) — the canonization of the scarlet letter. It is that to me, and nothing else whatever."

The pupils look a little alarmed. Strange that persons who will rhapsodize over pictures of the nude and Mrs. Tanqueray plays feel it incumbent always to resent a plain Saxon statement of the same order of thing.

Lady Heathcote pauses. My dear," she 26 finally says, " you forget that sin is merely undirected attempt at development, and that development is progress."

" Let us then stand still," I say, " and cease progressing. Painters and sculptors do not select three-legged colts, two-headed girls, bearded ladies, or hunchbacks, to immortalize and place before us for our criticism and admiration ; composers do not hurl discord at our ears ; why then should literature, under the alias of fidelity to life, hold up to us the sordid, the unclean, the scarred, the libertines, the prostitutes, and, decking them with all the roses and lilies of its splendid imagery, bid us come sup, and thank, and applaud, and call crime, innocence, and sin, art? Why, too, does the stage, which should be the best mouthpiece of literature, play out for us the lives of women and men from whose actual contact we would shrink as from a leper ? "

" Because, my dear, we like it ; because we are desirous of perfecting ourselves in the knowledge of all things, of sounding the depths of the most devious wanderings of the human being ; because we all have hor- 27 rible possibilities, everyone of us, and it is the trend of the age that we should be pastmasters in cognizance of every degree, of both innocence, and what you call sin."

And then we go somewhere and eat ices and presently take the train for Leamington.

" The season " at Harrowden-Burleigh came to an end: the eleven young women, who had been under the guidance of its facile mistress from October until April, fell apart all at once, and I doubt if any ever beheld each other again.

Lady Heathcote had written my mother, that of all her pupils, I was the one from whom she should expect the most ; that my innate vein of originality might surely be relied upon to land me on a pinnacle — a position, looking at it dispassionately, which must be uncommonly easeless. However, I was quit of Harrowden ; not sorry, nor yet glad; passive as yet, save that I sent the maid of her ladyship's choosing flying, and took one who suited me, and that I threw the pink powder in the fire, if I did retain the golden hair touch-up.

Mamma took a house near Queen's Gate for three months, and blandly informed me that she was going to bring me out ! "

She did, too. I had the inestimable privilege, accorded but few young women, of making my bud's bow twice. It was successful, too. My mother had the aplomb of a diplomat and at the same time the graciousness which a diplomat's wife should have — but has not always — and then, too (why do we shamefacedly name the greatest factor last?), she had unlimited money. The Americans, of course, elevated their brows and told one another that I had been launched years ago in New York ; nevertheless, they came and bade me Godspeed in my new career. When the English people heard the tale, they laughed and held it a refreshing jest ; both sets in reality, I think, looking upon my mother as a woman of positive genius. She was.

She had introduced me at home at seventeen; I amounted to worse than nothing. Four years later, after only eight months' seclusion, I am again a debutante abroad, and I am one of the most emphatic successes