IN THE OLD NewYork of the ’thirties a few families ruled, in simplicity and affluence. Of these were the Ralstons. The sturdy English and the rubicund and heavier Dutch had mingled to produce a prosperous, prudent and yet lavish society. To “do things handsomely” had always been a fundamental principle in this cautious world, built up on the fortunes of bankers, India merchants, shipbuilders, and shipchandlers. Those well-fed, slow-moving people, who seemed irritable and dyspeptic to European eyes only because the caprices of the climate had stripped them of superfluous flesh, and strung their nerves a little tighter, lived in a genteel monotony of which the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underground. Sensitive souls in those days were like muted keyboards, on which Fate played without a sound.

Mrs. Ralston approvingly examined the rosy-cheeked oval set in the blonde ruffles of the bonnet on which, in compliance with her husband’s instructions, she had spared no expense. It was a cabriolet of white velvet tied with wide satin ribbons and plumed with a crystal-spangled marabou—a wedding bonnet ordered for the marriage of her cousin, Charlotte Lovell, which was to take place that week at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. Charlotte was making a match exactly like Delia’s own: marrying a Ralston, of the Waverley Place branch, than which nothing could be safer, sounder or more—well, usual. Delia did not know why the word had occurred to her, for it could hardly be postulated, even of the young women of her own narrow clan, that they “usually” married Ralstons; but the soundness, safeness, suitability of the arrangement, did make it typical of the kind of alliance which a nice girl in the nicest set would serenely and blushfully forecast for herself.

She glanced complacently at the French wall-paper that reproduced a watered silk, with a “valanced” border and tassels between the loops. The mahogany bedstead, covered with a white embroidered counterpane, was symmetrically reflected in the mirror of the wardrobe that matched it. Colored lithographs of the “Four Seasons” by Leopold Robert surmounted groups of family daguerruotypes in deeply recessed gilt frames. The ormolu clock represented a shepherdess sitting on a fallen trunk, a basket of flowers at her feet. A shepherd, stealing up, surprised her with a kiss, while her little dog barked at him from a clump of roses. One knew the profession of the lovers by their crooks and the shape of their hats. This frivolous timepiece had been a wedding-gift from Delia’s aunt, Mrs. Manson Mingott, a dashing widow who lived in Paris and was received at the Tuileries. It had been intrusted by her to young Clement Spender, who had come back from Italy for a short holiday just after Delia’s marriage: the marriage which might never have been, if Clem Spender could have supported a wife, or had consented to give up painting and Rome for New York and the law. The young man (who looked, already, so odd and foreign and sarcastic) had laughingly assured the bride that her aunt’s gift was “the newest thing in the Palais Royal;” and the family, who admired Mrs. Manson Mingott’s taste, though they disapproved of her “foreignness,” had criticized Delia’s putting the clock in her bedroom instead of displaying it on the drawing-room mantel. But she liked, when she woke in the morning, to see the bold shepherd stealing his kiss.

Then came her illness. She caught cold on a moonlight sleighing party; the brick-rose circles deepened, and she began to cough. There was a report that she was “going like her father,” and she was hurried off to a remote village in Georgia, where she lived alone for a year with an old family governess. When she came back, every one felt at once that there was a change in her. She was pale, and thinner than ever, but with an exquisitely transparent cheek, darker eyes and redder hair; and the oddness of her appearance was increased by plain dresses of Quakerish cut. She had left off trinkets and watch-chains, always wore the same gray cloak and small close bonnet, and displayed a sudden zeal for visiting the poor. The family explained that during her year in the South she had been shocked by the hopeless degradation of the “poor whites” and their children, and that this revelation of misery had made it impossible for her to return to the light-hearted life of her contemporaries. Everyone agreed, with an exchange of significant glances, that this unnatural state of mind would “pass off in time;” and meanwhile old Mrs. Lovell, Chatty’s grandmother, who understood her perhaps better than the others, gave her a little money for her paupers, and lent her a room in the Lovell stables (at the back of the old Mercer Street house) where she gathered about her, in what would afterward have been called a “day-nursery,” some of the poor children of the neighborhood.