I
Let me say at once that I know no adventure is more important for the
Philadelphian, and that mine was scarcely worth the name as these things
go in Philadelphia.
It is the one adventure that should be roses all the way, but for me it
was next to no roses at all. To begin with, I was poor. My Father had
lost his money in the years of upheaval following the Civil War and had
never got it back again. Nowadays this would not matter. A girl of
seventeen, when she comes home from school, can turn round, find
something to do, and support herself. She could in the old days too, if
she was thrown on her own resources. I had friends no older than myself
who taught, or were in the Mint--that harbour of refuge for the young or
old Philadelphia lady in reduced circumstances. But my trouble was that
I was not supposed to be thrown on my own resources. A Philadelphia
father would have felt the social structure totter had he permitted his
daughter to work as long as he was alive to work for her. When he had
many daughters and luck went against him, the advantage of this attitude
was less obvious to them than to him. Exemplary as was the theory, which
I applaud my Father for acting up to since it happened to be his, it
had its inconvenience when put into practice. To be guarded from the
hardship of labour by the devoted father did not always put money into
the daughter's pocket.
[Illustration: THE CUSTOMS HOUSE]
Had I been more at home in Philadelphia, my poverty might not have stood
so much in my light. A hundred years before Gouverneur Morris had
praised Philadelphia, which in its respect for "virtuous poverty" he
thought so much more generous than other capitals where social splendour
was indispensable, and in this the town had not changed. It was to
Philadelphia's credit that a girl's social success did not depend on the
length of her dressmaker's bill or the scale of her entertaining. More
than one as poor as I would have a different story to tell. But I
suffered from having had no social training or apprenticeship. The
Convent had been concerned in preparing me for society in the next
world, not in this, and I had stayed in the Convent too long to make the
many friendships that do more than most things to launch a girl on her
social career--too long, for that matter, to know what society meant.
It was a good thing that I did not know, did not realize what was ahead
of me, that I allowed myself to be led like a Philadelphian to the
slaughter, for a little experience of society is good for everybody.
Unless men are to live like brutes--or like monks--they must establish
some sort of social relations, and if the social game is played at all,
it should be according to the rules. Nowhere are the rules so rigorous
as in Philadelphia, nowhere in America based upon more inexorable, as
well as dignified, traditions, and I do not doubt that because of the
stumbling blocks in my path, I learned more about them than the
Philadelphia girl whose path was rose-strewn. Were history my mission,
it would be amusing to trace these traditions to their source--first
through the social life of the Friends who, however, are so exclusive
that should this part of the story ever be told, whether as romance or
history, it must come from the inside; and then, through the gaieties of
the World's People who flatter themselves they are as exclusive, and who
have the name for it, and whose exclusiveness is wholesale license
compared to that of the Friends:--through the two distinct societies
that have lived and flourished side by side ever since Philadelphia was.
But my concern is solely with the gaieties as I, individually, shared in
them. Now that I have outlived the discomforts of the experience, I can
flatter myself that, in my small, insignificant fashion, I was helping
to carry on old and fine traditions.
II
The most serious of these discomforts arose from the question of
clothes, a terrifying question under the existing conditions in the
Third Street house, involving more industrious dress-making upstairs in
the third story front bedroom than I cared about, and a waste of
energies that should have been directed into more profitable channels. I
sewed badly and was conscious of it. At the Convent, except for the
necessity of darning my stockings, I had been as free from this sort of
toiling as a lily of the field, and yet I too had gone arrayed, if
hardly with the same conspicuous success, and, in my awkward hands, the
white tarlatan--who wears tarlatan now?--and the cheap silk from Second
Street, which composed my coming out trousseau, were not growing into
such things of beauty as to reconcile me to my new task.
[Illustration: UNDER BROAD STREET STATION AT FIFTEENTH STREET]
As unpleasant were the preliminary lessons in dancing forced upon me by
my family when, in my pride of recent graduation with honours, it
offended me to be thought by anybody in need of learning anything. One
evening every week during a few months, two or three friends and cousins
joined me in the Third Street parlour to be drilled into dancing shape
for coming out by Madame Martin, the large, portly Frenchwoman who, in
the same crinoline and heelless, sidelaced shoes, taught generations of
Philadelphia children to dance. Even the Convent could not do without
her, though there, to avoid the sinfulness of "round dances," we had,
under her tuition, waltzed and polkaed hand in hand, a method which my
family feared, if not corrected, might lead to my disgrace.
I seem rather a pathetic figure as I see myself obediently stitching and
practising my steps without an idea of the true meaning and magnitude of
the adventure I was getting ready for, or a chance of being set about it
in the right way. That right way would have been for somebody to give a
party or a dance or a reception especially for me to come out at. But
nobody among my friends and relations was obliging enough to accept the
responsibility, and at home my Father could not get so far as to think
of it. He would have needed too disastrous a panic in Third Street to
provide the money. Madame Martin's lessons were already an extravagance
and when, on top of them, he had gone so far as to pay for my
subscription to the Dancing Class, and, in a cabless town, for the
carriage, fortunately shared with friends, to go to it in, he had done
all his bank account allowed him to do to start me in life.
It would be as useful to explain that the sun rises in the east and sets
in the west as to tell a Philadelphian that the Dancing Class to which I
refer was not of the variety presided over by Madame Martin, but one to
which Philadelphians went to make use of just such lessons as I had been
struggling with for weeks. The origin of its name I never knew, I never
asked, the Dancing Class being one of the Philadelphia institutions the
Philadelphian took for granted: then, as it always had been and still
is, I believe, a distinguished social function of the year. To belong to
it was indispensable to the Philadelphian with social pretensions. It
was held every other Monday, if I remember--to think I should have a
doubt on a subject of such importance!-and the first of the series was
given so early in the winter that with it the season may be said to have
opened. Perhaps this fact helped my family to decide that it was at the
Dancing Class I had best make my first appearance.
III
Youth is brave out of sheer ignorance. When the moment came, it never
occurred to me to hesitate or to consider the manner of my introduction
to the world. I was content that my Brother should be my sole chaperon.
I rather liked myself in my home-made white tarlatan, feeling very much
dressed in my first low neck. I entertained no misgivings as to the fate
awaiting me, imagining it as inevitable for a girl who was "out" to
dance and have a good time as for a bird to fly once its wings were
spread. If there were men to dance with, what more was needed?--it never
having entered into my silly head that it was the girl's sad fate to
have to wait for the man to ask her, and that sometimes the brute
didn't.
I had to go no further than the dressing-room at the Natatorium, where
the Dancing Class then met, to learn that society was not so simple as I
thought. I have since been to many strange lands among many strange
people, but never have I felt so much of a stranger as when I, a
Philadelphian born, doing conscientiously what Philadelphia expected of
me, was suddenly dropped down into the midst of a lot of Philadelphia
girls engaged in the same duty. There was a freemasonry among them I
could not help feeling right away--the freemasonry that went deeper than
the chance of birth and the companionship of duty--the freemasonry that
came from their all having grown up together since their perambulator
days in Rittenhouse Square, having learned to dance together, gone to
children's parties together, studied at Miss Irwin's school together,
spent the summer by the sea and in the mountains together, in a word,
from their having done everything together until they were united by
close bonds, the closer for being undefinable, that I, Convent bred,
with not an idea, not a habit, not a point of view, in common with them,
could not break through. I never have got quite over the feeling, though
time has modified it. There is no loneliness like the loneliness in a
crowd, doubly so if all the others in the crowd know each other. In the
dressing-room that first evening it was so overwhelming to discover
myself entirely out of it where I should have been entirely in, that,
without the stay and support of my friend, of old the Prince of Denmark
to my Ghost of Hamlet's Father, and her sister, who had come out under
more favourable conditions, I do not think I could have gone a step
further in the great social adventure.
As it was, with my heart in my boots, my hand trembling on my Brother's
arm, to the music of Hassler's band, I entered the big bare hall of the
Natatorium, and was out with no more fuss and with nobody particularly
excited about it save myself.
[Illustration: THE PHILADELPHIA CLUB, THIRTEENTH AND WALNUT STREETS]
Things were a little better once away from the dressing-room. My Brother
was gay, had been out for two or three years, knew everybody. If he
could not introduce me to the women he could introduce the men to me,
and the freemasonry existing among them from their all having gone to
the Episcopal Academy and the University of Pennsylvania together, from
their all having played cricket and baseball and football, or gone
hunting together, from their all belonging to the same clubs, was not
the kind from which I need suffer. Besides, those were the days when it
was easy for the Philadelphia girl to get to know men, to make friends
of them, without the Philadelphia gossip pouncing upon her and the
Philadelphia father asking them their intentions--they could call upon
her as often as they liked and the Philadelphia father would retreat
from the front and back parlours, she could go out alone with them and
the Philadelphia father would not interfere, knowing they had been
brought up to see in themselves her protectors, especially appointed to
look out for her. Some signs of change I might have discerned had I been
observant. More than the five o'clock tea affectation was to come of the
new coquetting with English fashions. Enough had already come for me to
know that if my Brother now and then asked me to go to the theatre, it
was not for the pleasure of my company, but because a girl he wanted to
take would not accept if he did not provide a companion for the sake of
the proprieties. I am sure the old Philadelphia way was the most
sensible. Certainly it was the most helpful if you happened to be a girl
coming out with next to no friends among the women in what ought to have
been your own set, with no chaperon to see that you made them, and, at
the Dancing Class, with no hostess to keep a protecting eye on you but,
instead, patronesses too absorbed in their triumphs to notice the less
fortunate straggling far behind.
Well, anyway, if honesty forbids me to call myself a success, it is a
satisfaction to remember that I did not have to play the wall-flower,
which I would have thought the most terrible disaster that could befall
me. To have to sit out the German alone would have been to sink to such
depths of shame that I never afterwards could have held up my head. It
was astonishing what mountains of despair we made of these social
molehills! I can still see the sad faces of the girls in a row against
the wall, with their air of announcing to all whom it might concern:
"Here we are, at your service, come and rescue us!" But there was
another dreadful custom that did give me away only too often. When a man
asked a girl beforehand to dance the German, Philadelphia expected him
to send her a bunch of roses: always the same roses--Boston buds,
weren't they called?--and from Pennock's on Chestnut Street if he knew
what was what. To take your place roseless was to proclaim that you had
not been asked until the eleventh hour. It was not pleasant. However, if
I went sometimes without the roses, I always had the partner. I had even
moments of triumph as when, one dizzy evening before the assembled
Dancing Class, I danced with Willie White.
It is not indiscreet to mention so great a person by name and, in doing
so, not presuming to use it so familiarly--he was the Dancing Class, as
far as I know, he had no other occupation; and his name was _Willie_,
not _William_, not _Mr._ White. Willie, as Philadelphians said it, was
a title of honour, like the Coeur de Lion or the Petit Caporal bestowed
upon other great men--the measure of the estimate in which social
Philadelphia held him. Bean Nash in the Pump Room at Bath was no
mightier power than Willie White in the Dancing Class at the Natatorium.
He ruled it, and ruled it magnificently: an autocrat, a tyrant, under
whose yoke social Philadelphia was eager to thrust its neck. What he
said was law, whom he approved could enter, whom he objected to was
without redress, his recognition of the Philadelphian's claims to
admission was a social passport. He saw to everything, he led the
German, and I do not suppose there was a girl who, at her first Dancing
Class her first winter, did not, at her first chance, take him out in
the German as her solemn initiation. That is how I came to enjoy my
triumph, and I do not remember repeating it for he never condescended to
take me out in return. But still, I can say that once I danced with
Willie White at the Dancing Class--And did I once see Shelley plain?
IV
There were other powers, as I was made quickly to understand--not only
the powers that all Biddles, Cadwalladers, Rushes, Ingersolls, Whartons,
in a word all members of approved Philadelphia families were by
Philadelphia right, but a few who had risen even higher than that
splendid throng and were accepted as their leaders. It was not one of
the most brilliant periods in the social history of Philadelphia. Mrs.
Rush had had no successor, no woman presided over what could have been
given the name of Salon as she had. Even the Wistar parties, exclusively
for men, discontinued during the upheaval of the Civil War, had not yet
been revived. But, notwithstanding the comparative quiet and depression,
there were a few shining social lights.
Had I been asked in the year of my coming out who was the greatest woman
in the world, I should have answered, without hesitation, Mrs. Bowie.
She, too, may be mentioned by name without indiscretion for she, too,
has become historical. She was far from beautiful at the date to which I
refer, she was no longer in her first youth, was inclined to stoutness
and I fear had not learned how to fight it as women who would be in the
fashion must learn to-day. She was not rich and the fact is worth
recording, so characteristic is it of Philadelphia. The names of leaders
of society in near New York usually had millions attached to them, those
there allowed to lead paid a solid price for it in their entertaining.
But Mrs. Bowie's power depended upon her personal fascination--with
family of course to back it--which was said to be irresistible. And yet
not to know her was to be unknown. Intimacy with her was to have
arrived. At least a bowing acquaintance, an occasional invitation to her
house, was essential to success or its dawning. She entertained modestly
as far as I could gather from my experience,--as far as I can now
depend on my memory--gave no balls, no big dinners; if there were
select little dinners, I was too young and insignificant to hear of
them. I never got farther than the afternoon tea to which everybody was
invited once every winter, a comfortless crush in her small house, with
next to nothing to eat and drink as things to eat and drink go according
to the lavish Philadelphia standard. But that did not matter. Nothing
mattered except to be there, to be seen there. I was tremendously
pleased with myself the first time the distinction was mine, though of
my presence in her house Mrs. Bowie was no doubt amiably unconscious. I
never knew her to recognize me out of it, though I sometimes met her
when she came informally to see one of my Aunts who was her friend, or
to give me the smile at the Dancing Class that would have raised my
drooping spirits. The only notice she ever spared me there was to
express to my Brother--who naturally, brother-like, made me
uncomfortable by reporting it to me--her opinion of my poor,
unpretentious, home-made, Second Street silk as an example of the
absurdity of a long train to dance in, which shows how completely she
had forgotten who I was.
Her chief rival, if so exalted a personage could have a rival, was Mrs.
Connor, from whom also a smile, a recognition, was equivalent to social
promotion. Her fascination did not have to be explained. She was an
unqualified beauty, though the vision I have retained is of beauty in
high-necked blue velvet and chinchilla, which I could not have enjoyed
at the Dancing Class or any evening party. I realise as I write that in
the details of Philadelphia's social history I would come out badly from
too rigid an examination.
V
To Mrs. Connor's I was never asked with or without the crowd. But other
houses were opened to me, other invitations came, for, if I had not
friends, my family had. My white tarlatan and my Second Street silk had
grown shabby before the winter was half over. At many parties I got to
know what a delightful thing a Philadelphia party was, and if I had gone
to one instead of many I should have known as well. Philadelphia had a
standard for its parties as for everything, and to deviate from this
standard, to attempt originality, to invent the "freak" entertainments
of New York, would have been excessively bad form. The same card printed
by Dreka requested the pleasure of your company to the same Philadelphia
house--the Philadelphia hostess would not have stooped to invite you to
the Continental or the Girard, the LaPierre House or the Colonnade,
which were the Bellevue and the Ritz of my day--where you danced in the
same spacious front and back parlours, with the same crash on the floor,
to the same music by Hassler's band: where you ate the same Terrapin,
Croquettes, Chicken Salad, Oysters, Boned Turkey, Ice cream, little
round Cakes with white icing on top, and drank the same Fish-House Punch
provided by the same Augustine; where the same Cotillon began at the
same hour with the same figures and the same favours and the same
partners; where there was the same dressing-room in the second story
front and the same Philadelphia girls who froze me on my arrival and on
my departure. There was no getting away from the same people in
Philadelphia. That was the worst of it. The town was big enough for a
chance to meet different people in different houses every evening in the
week, but by that arbitrary boundary of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and
Pine," it has made itself socially into a village with the pettiness and
limitations of village life. I have never wondered that Philadelphians
are as cordial to strangers as everybody who ever came to Philadelphia
knows them to be--that Philadelphia doors are as hospitable as Thackeray
once described them. Philadelphians have reason to rejoice and make the
most of it when occasionally they see a face they have not been seeing
regularly at every party they have been to, and hear talk they have not
listened to all their lives.
[Illustration: THE NEW RITZ-CARLTON; THE FINISHING TOUCHES; THE WALNUT
STREET ADDITION HAS SINCE BEEN MADE]
Sometimes it was to the afternoon reception the card engraved by Dreka
invited me, and then again it was to meet the same people and--in the
barbarous mode of the day--to eat the same Croquettes, Chicken Salad,
Terrapin, Boned Turkey, Ice-cream, and little round Cakes with white
icing on top, and to drink the same Punch from Augustine's at five
o'clock in the afternoon, and at least risk digestion in a good cause.
But rarely did the card engraved by Dreka invite me to dinner, and I
could not have been invited to anything I liked better. I have always
thought dinner the most civilized form of entertainment. It may have
been an entertainment Philadelphia preferred to reserve for my elders,
and, if I am not mistaken, the most formal dinners, or dinners with any
pretence to being public, were then usually men's affairs, just as the
Saturday Club, and the Wistar parties had been, and the Clover Club, and
the Fish-House Club were: from them women being as religiously excluded
as from the dinners of the City Companies in London, or from certain
monasteries in Italy and the East. Indeed, as I look back, it seems to
me that woman's social presence was correct only in private houses and
at private gatherings. Nothing took away my breath so completely on
going back to Philadelphia after my long absence as the Country Clubs
where men and women now meet and share their amusements, if it was not
the concession of a dining-room to women by a Club like the Union League
that, of old, was in my esteem as essentially masculine as the
Philadelphia Lady thought the sauces at Blossom's Hotel in Chester.
But there were plenty of other things to do which I did with less rather
than more thoroughness. I paid midday visits, wondering why duty should
have set me so irksome a task. I received with friends on New Year's
Day--an amazing day when men paid off their social debts and made, at
some houses, their one call of the year, joining together by twos and
threes and fours to charter a carriage, or they would never have got
through their round, armed with all their courage either to refuse
positively or to accept everywhere the glass of Madeira or Punch and the
usual masterpiece from Augustine's. It was another barbarous custom, but
an old Philadelphia custom, and Philadelphia has lost so many old
customs that I could have wished this one spared. I went to the concerts
of the Orpheus Club. I went to the Opera and the Theatre when I was
asked, which was not often. I passed with the proper degree of
self-consciousness the Philadelphia Club at Thirteenth and Walnut, the
same row of faces always looking out over newspapers and magazines from
the same row of windows. And I did a great many things that were
pleasant and a great many more that were unpleasant, conscientiously
rejecting nothing social I was told to do when the opportunity to do it
came my way. But it all counted for nothing weighed in the balance with
the one thing I did not do--I never went to the Assembly.