Washington Square

S 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.