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

for a
creed but to live for a bank-account. The result had been beyond their hopes,
and their religion was tinged by their success. An edulcorated Church of
England which, under the conciliatory name of the “Episcopal Church of the
United States of America,” left out the coarser allusions in the Marriage
Service, slid over the comminatory passages in the Athanasian Creed, and
thought it more respectful to say “Our Father who” than “which” in the Lord’s
Prayer, was exactly suited to the spirit of compromise whereon the Ralstons had
built themselves up. There was in all the tribe the same instinctive recoil
from new religions as from unaccounted-for people. Institutional to the core,
they represented the conservative element that holds new societies together as
seaplants bind the seashore.
                 Compared
with the Ralstons, even such traditionalists as the Lovells, the Halseys or the
Vandergraves appeared careless, indifferent to money, almost reckless in their
impulses and indecisions. Old John Frederick Ralston, the stout founder of the
race, had perceived the difference, and emphasized it to his son, Frederick
John, in whom he had scented a faint leaning toward the untried and
unprofitable.
                 “You
let the Lannings and the Dagonets and the Spenders take risks and fly kites.
It’s the county-family blood in ’em: we’ve nothing to do with that. Look how
they’re petering out already—the men, I mean. Let your boys marry their girls,
if you like (they’re wholesome and handsome); though I’d sooner see my
grandsons take a Lovell or a Vandergrave, or any of our own kind. But don’t let
your sons go mooning around after their young fellows, horse-racing, and
running down south to those d——d Springs , and gambling
at New Orleans, and all the rest of it. That’s how you’ll build up the family,
and keep the weather out. The way we’ve always done it.”
                 Frederick
John listened, obeyed, married a Halsey, and passively followed in his father’s
steps. He belonged to the cautious generation of New York gentleman who revered Hamilton and served Jefferson , who longed to lay out New York like Washington , and who laid it out instead like a
gridiron, lest they should be thought “undemocratic” by people they secretly
looked down upon. Shopkeepers to the marrow, they put in their windows the
wares there was most demand for, keeping their private opinions for the
back-shop, where through lack of use, they gradually lost substance and colour.
                 The
fourth generation of Ralstons had nothing left in the way of convictions save
an acute sense of honour in private and business matters; on the life of the
community and the state they took their daily views from the newspapers, and
the newspapers they already despised. The Ralstons had done little to shape the
destiny of their country, except to finance the Cause when it had become safe
to do so. They were related to many of the great men who had built the
Republic; but no Ralston had so far committed himself as to be great. As old
John Frederick said, it was safer to be satisfied with three per cent: they
regarded heroism as a form of gambling. Yet by merely being so numerous and so
similar they had come to have a weight in the community. People said: “The
Ralstons” when they wished to invoke a precedent. This attribution of authority
had gradually convinced the third generation of its collective importance, and
the fourth, to which Delia Ralston’s husband belonged, had the ease and
simplicity of a ruling class.
                 Within
the limits of their universal caution, the Ralstons fulfilled their obligations
as rich and respected citizens. They figured on the boards of all the
old-established charities, gave handsomely to thriving institutions, had the
best cooks in New York , and when they travelled abroad ordered statuary of the American
sculptors in