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

Rome whose reputation was already established. The first Ralston who had
brought home a statue had been regarded as a wild fellow; but when it became
known that the sculptor had executed several orders for the British aristocracy
it was felt in the family that this too was a three per cent investment.
                 Two
marriages with the Dutch Vandergraves had consolidated these qualities of
thrift and handsome living, and the carefully built-up Ralston character was
now so congenital that Delia Ralston sometimes asked herself whether, were she
to turn her own little boy loose in a wilderness, he would not create a small
New York there, and be on all its boards of directors.
                 Delia
Lovell had married James Ralston at twenty. The marriage, which had taken place
in the month of September, 1840, had been solemnized, as was then the custom,
in the drawing-room of the bride’s country home, at what is now the corner of
Avenue A
and Ninety-first Street , overlooking the Sound. Thence her husband
had driven her (in Grandmamma Lovell’s canary-coloured coach with a fringed
hammer-cloth) through spreading suburbs and untidy elm-shaded streets to one of
the new houses in Gramercy Park, which the pioneers of the younger set were
just beginning to affect; and there, at five-and-twenty, she was established,
the mother of two children, the possessor of a generous allowance of pin-money,
and, by common consent, one of the handsomest and most popular “young matrons”
(as they were called) of her day.
                 She
was thinking placidly and gratefully of these things as she sat one afternoon
in her handsome bedroom in Gramercy Park . She was too near to the primitive Ralstons
to have as clear a view of them, as for instance, the son in question might one
day command: she lived under them as unthinkingly as one lives under the laws
of one’s country. Yet that tremor of the muted key-board, that secret
questioning which sometimes beat in her like wings, would now and then so
divide her from them that for a fleeting moment she could survey them in their
relation to other things. The moment was always fleeting; she dropped back from
it quickly, breathless and a little pale, to her children, her house-keeping,
her new dresses and her kindly Jim.
                 She
thought of him today with a smile of tenderness, remembering how he had told
her to spare no expense on her new bonnet. Though she was twenty-five, and
twice a mother, her image was still surprisingly fresh. The plumpness then
thought seemly in a young wife stretched the grey silk across her bosom, and
caused her heavy gold watch-chain—after it left the anchorage of the brooch of
St. Peter’s in mosaic that fastened her low-cut Cluny collar—to dangle
perilously in the void above a tiny waist buckled into a velvet waist-band. But
the shoulders above sloped youthfully under her Cashmere scarf, and every movement was as quick as a
girl’s.
                 Mrs.
Jim 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 marabout—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 Waverly 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 blushingly forecast