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Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski By: Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907) |
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By Thomas Bailey Aldrich Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company Copyright, 1873, 1885, and 1901
I. We are accustomed to speak with a certain light irony of the tendency
which women have to gossip, as if the sin itself, if it is a sin, were
of the gentler sex, and could by no chance be a masculine peccadillo.
So far as my observation goes, men are as much given to small talk as
women, and it is undeniable that we have produced the highest type of
gossiper extant. Where will you find, in or out of literature, such
another droll, delightful, chatty busybody as Samuel Pepys, Esq.,
Secretary to the Admiralty in the reigns of those fortunate gentlemen
Charles II. and James II. of England? He is the king of tattlers as
Shakespeare is the king of poets. If it came to a matter of pure gossip, I would back Our Club against
the Sorosis or any women's club in existence. Whenever you see in our
drawing room four or five young fellows lounging in easy chairs, cigar
in hand, and now and then bringing their heads together over the small
round Japanese table which is always the pivot of these social circles,
you may be sure that they are discussing Tom's engagement, or Dick's
extravagance, or Harry's hopeless passion for the younger Miss
Fleurdelys. It is here old Tippleton gets execrated for that everlasting
bon mot of his which was quite a success at dinner parties forty years
ago; it is here the belle of the season passes under the scalpels of
merciless young surgeons; it is here B's financial condition is handled
in a way that would make B's hair stand on end; it is here, in short,
that everything is canvassed everything that happens in our set, I
mean, much that never happens, and a great deal that could not possibly
happen. It was at Our Club that I learned the particulars of the Van
Twiller affair. It was great entertainment to Our Club, the Van Twiller affair, though
it was rather a joyless thing, I fancy, for Van Twiller. To understand
the case fully, it should be understood that Ralph Van Twiller is one of
the proudest and most sensitive men living. He is a lineal descendant
of Wouter Van Twiller, the famous old Dutch governor of New York Nieuw
Amsterdam, as it was then; his ancestors have always been burgomasters
or admirals or generals, and his mother is the Mrs. Vanrensselaer
Van zandt Van Twiller whose magnificent place will be pointed out to
you on the right bank of the Hudson, as you pass up the historic river
towards Idlewild. Ralph is about twenty five years old. Birth made him
a gentleman, and the rise of real estate some of it in the family since
the old governor's time made him a millionaire. It was a kindly fairy
that stepped in and made him a good fellow also. Fortune, I take it, was
in her most jocund mood when she heaped her gifts in this fashion on
Van Twiller, who was, and will be again, when this cloud blows over, the
flower of Our Club. About a year ago there came a whisper if the word "whisper" is not
too harsh a term to apply to what seemed a mere breath floating gently
through the atmosphere of the billiard room imparting the intelligence
that Van Twiller was in some kind of trouble. Just as everybody suddenly
takes to wearing square toed boots, or to drawing his neckscarf through
a ring, so it became all at once the fashion, without any preconcerted
agreement, for everybody to speak of Van Twilier as a man in some way
under a cloud. But what the cloud was, and how he got under it, and why
he did not get away from it, were points that lifted themselves into
the realm of pure conjecture. There was no man in the club with strong
enough wing to his imagination to soar to the supposition that Van
Twiller was embarrassed in money matters. Was he in love? That appeared
nearly as improbable; for if he had been in love all the world that
is, perhaps a hundred first families would have known all about it
instantly. "He has the symptoms," said Delaney, laughing. "I remember once when
Jack Hemming " "Ned!" cried Hemming, "I protest against any allusion to that business... Continue reading book >>
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