Edith Wharton

The Old Maid Edith Wharton

The sturdy English and the rubicund and heavier Dutch had mingled to produce aprosperous, prudent and yet lavish society. To "do things handsomely" had always been afundamental principle in this cautious world, built up on the fortunes of bankers, Indiamerchants, shipbuilders and ship-chandlers. Those well-fed slow-moving people, who seemedirritable and dyspeptic to European eyes only because the caprices of the climate had strippedthem of superfluous flesh, and strung their nerves a little tighter, lived in a genteel monotony ofwhich the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underground. Sensitive souls in those days were like muted key-boards, on which Fate played without a sound. In this compact society, built of solidly welded blocks, one of the largest areas was filled bythe Ralstons and their ramifications. The Ralstons were of middle-class English stock. They hadnot come to the colonies to die for a creed but to live for a bank-account. The result had beenbeyond their hopes, and their religion was tinged by their success. An edulcorated Church ofEngland which, under the conciliatory name of the "Episcopal Church of the United States ofAmerica," left out the coarser allusions in the Marriage Service, slid over the comminatorypassages in the Athanasian Creed, and thought it more respectful to say "Our Father who" than"which" in the Lord's Prayer, was exactly suited to the spirit of compromise whereon theRalstons had built themselves up. There was in all the tribe the same instinctive recoil from newreligions as from unaccounted-for people. Institutional to the core, they represented theconservative element that holds new societies together as seaplants bind the seashore.