s may not at first seem to make it
more clear why she should take into her favor an aspirant who, on the
face of the matter, was not original, and whose Corsica was a flat New
England seaport; but it afterward became plain that he owed his brief
happiness--it was very brief--to her father's opposition; her father's
and her mother's, and even her uncles' and her aunts'. In those days,
in New York, the different members of a family took an interest in its
alliances, and the house of Gressie looked askance at an engagement
between the most beautiful of its daughters and a young man who was not
in a paying business. Georgina declared that they were meddlesome and
vulgar,--she could sacrifice her own people, in that way, without
a scruple,--and Benyon's position improved from the moment that Mr.
Gressie--ill-advised Mr. Gressie--ordered the girl to have nothing to do
with him. Georgina was imperial in this--that she wouldn't put up with
an order. When, in the house in Twelfth Street, it began to be talked
about that she had better be sent to Europe with some eligible friend,
Mrs. Portico, for instance, who was always planning to go, and who
wanted as a companion some young mind, fresh from manuals and extracts,
to serve as a fountain of history and geography,--when this scheme for
getting Georgina out of the way began to be aired, she immediately said
to Raymond Benyon, "Oh, yes, I 'll marry you!" She said it in such an
off-hand way that, deeply as he desired her, he was almost tempted to
answer, "But, my dear, have you really thought about it?"

This little drama went on, in New York, in the ancient days, when
Twelfth Street had but lately ceased to be suburban, when the squares
had wooden palings, which were not often painted; when there were
poplars in important thoroughfares and pigs in the lateral ways; when
the theatres were miles distant from Madison Square, and the battered
rotunda of Castle Garden echoed with expensive vocal music; when "the
park" meant the grass-plats of the city hall, and the Bloomingdale
road was an eligible drive; when Hoboken, of a summer afternoon, was a
genteel resort, and the handsomest house in town was on the corner
of the Fifth Avenue and Fifteenth Street. This will strike the modern
reader, I fear, as rather a primitive epoch; but I am not sure that the
strength of human passions is in proportion to the elongation of a city.
Several of them, at any rate, the most robust and most familiar,