People of the Whirlpool | Page 8

easy to
comprehend and love. While now, when Richard and Ian puzzle me, all
I need to do is to point to father and Evan, and say, "Look! ask them,
for they can tell you all you need to know!"
* * * * *
Almost sunset, the boys climbing up stairs, and Effie bringing a letter?
Yes, and from Lavinia Dorman, pages and pages--the dear soul! I must
wait for a light. What is this?--she wishes to see me--will make me a
long visit--in May--if I like--has no longer the conscience to ask me to
leave the twins to come to her--boys of their age need so much
care--then something about Josephus! Yes, Sylvia Latham is the

daughter of the new house on the Bluffs, etc. You blessed twins! here is
another advantage I owe to you--at last a promised visit from Lavinia
Dorman!
Ah, as I push my book into the desk the reason for its title turns up
before me, worded in Martin Cortright's precise language:--
"Everything, my dear Barbara, has a precedent in history or the basis of
it. It is well known that the Indian tribes have taken their distinctive
names chiefly from geographical features, and these often in turn
control the pace of the people. The name for the island since called
New Amsterdam and York was Mon-ah-tan-uk, a phrase descriptive of
the rushing waters of Hell Gate that separated them from their Long
Island neighbours, the inhabitants themselves being called by these
neighbours Mon-ah-tans, anglice Manhattans, literally, _People of the
Whirlpool_, a title which, even though the termagant humour of the
waters be abated, it beseems me as aptly fits them at this day."

II
MISS LAVINIA'S LETTERS TO BARBARA
NEW YORK, "GREENWICH VILLAGE," January 20, 19--.
"So you are glad that I have returned? I wish that I could say so also, in
your hearty tone of conviction. Every day of the two years that I have
been scattering myself about Europe I have wished myself at home in
the house where I was born, and have wandered through the rooms in
my dreams; yet now that I am here, I find that I was mixing the past
impossibly with the present, in a way common to those over fifty. Yes,
you see I no longer pretend, wear unsuitable headgear, and blink
obliviously at my age as I did in those trying later forties. I not only
face it squarely, but exaggerate it, for it is so much more comfortable to
have people say 'Fifty-five! Is it possible?'
"By the way, do you know that you and I share a distinction in common?
We are both living in the houses where we were born, for the reason
that we wish to and not because we cannot help ourselves. Since I have
been away it appears that every one I know, of my own age, has made a
change of some sort, and joined the two streams that are flowing
steadily upward, east and west of the Park; while the people who were
neither my financial nor social equals thirty years ago are dividing the
year into quarters, with a house for each. A few months in town, a few

of hotel life for 'rest' in the south, then a 'between-season' residence
near by, seaside next, mountains in early autumn, and the
'between-season' again before the winter cruise through the Whirlpool.
"I like that name that your Martin Cortright gives to New York. Before
I went abroad I should have resented it bitterly, but the two months
since my return have convinced me of its truth, which I have fought
against for many years; for even the most staid of us who, either of
choice or necessity, give the social vortex a wide berth, cannot escape
from the unrest of it, or sight of the wreckage it from time to time gives
forth. It is strange that I have not met this Cortright, or never even
knew that he shared your father's admiration of your mother, though
owing to our school tie we were like sisters. Yet it was like her to regret
and hold sacred any pain she might have caused, no matter how
unwillingly. Did his elder sister marry a Schuyler, though not one of
the well-known branch, and did he as a boy live in one of those houses
on the west side of Lafayette Place that were later turned into an hotel?
"The worst of it all appears to me to be that the increase of wealth in
the upper class is exterminating the home idea, to which I cling, single
woman as I am; and consequently the middle classes, as blind copyists,
also are tending to throw it over.
"The rich, having no particular reason for remaining in any