Edith Wharton - Novel 15 by Old New York (v2.1)

“Well—?”
                 “Well,
she died intestate, and Netta Kent—Netta Cosby—turned out to be the next of
kin. There wasn’t much to be got out of the estate (or so they thought) and, as
the Cosby’s are always hard up, the house in Tenth Street had to be sold, and
the pictures were very nearly sent off to the auction room with all the rest of
the stuff. But nobody supposed they would bring anything, and the auctioneer said
that if you tried to sell pictures with carpets and bedding and kitchen
furniture it always depreciated the whole thing; and so, as the Cosbys had some
bare walls to cover, they sent for the whole lot—there were about thirty—and
decided to have them cleaned and hang them up. ‘After all,’ Netta said, ‘as
well as I can make out through the cobwebs, some of them look like rather jolly
copies of early Italian things.’ But as she was short of cash she decided to
clean them at home instead of sending them to an expert; and one day, while she
was operating on this very one before you, with her sleeves rolled up, the man
called, who always does call on such
occasions; the man who knows. In the given case, it was a quiet fellow
connected with the Louvre, who’d brought her a letter from Paris, and whom
she’d invited to one of her stupid dinners. He was announced, and she thought
it would be a joke to let him see what she was doing; she has pretty arms, you
may remember. So he was asked into the dining-room, where he found her with a
pail of hot water and soap-suds, and this laid out on the table; and the first thing he did was to grab her pretty arm so
tight that it was black and blue, while he shouted out: ‘God in heaven! Not hot water!’”
                 My
friend leaned back with a sigh of mingled resentment and satisfaction, and we
sat silently looking up at the lovely “Adoration” above the mantelpiece.
                 “That’s
how I got it a little cheaper—most of the old varnish was gone for good. But
luckily for her it was the first picture she had attacked; and as for the
others—you must see them, that’s all I can say…Wait; I’ve got the catalogue
somewhere about…”
                 He
began to rummage for it, and I asked, remembering how nearly I had married
Netta Kent: “Do you mean to say she didn’t keep a single one of them?”
                 “Oh,
yes—in the shape of pearls and Rolls–Royces. And you’ve seen their new house in
Fifth Avenue?” He ended with a grin of irony: “The best joke is that Jim was
just thinking of divorcing her when the pictures were discovered.”
                 “Poor
little Louisa!” I sighed.
                   
     
     

  The Old Maid.
 
 
                 The ’Fifties.
     
  Part I.
 
 
  I.
 
 
                 In
the old New York of the ’fifties 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, ship-builders and ship-chandlers. 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 key-boards, on which Fate played
without a sound.
                 In
this compact society, built of solidly welded blocks, one of the largest areas
was filled by the Ralstons and their ramifications. The Ralstons were of
middle-class English stock. They had not come to the Colonies to die