Letters Home. William Dean Howells
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of all places, and teased me with the sense of having seen him before, somewhere. I can't make out yet where it was, if it was really anywhere, but probably it was nowhere. He interested me past the vain quest by asking me when the prevalent actress had turned from me, whether it were she, and then rushed off to a large, flowery young woman — sun-flowery is not too much — and seemed to excite her with the fact as much as himself. Their emotion was so interesting that I did a thing I should not have done when I was under fifty. I followed him up and asked him if he would like to be presented, and the young woman to whom his eager eyes referred me, said, " She would give the world to, " and I led them up, and sacrificed them on the shrine of the amiable deity, who had instantly forgotten me, but received us as if we were her oldest friends. After her dispersing welcome, we rather had ourselves on each others' hands, and following an interval in which we treated one another as veteran New Yorkers, we arrived at a sense of our common strangeness, and exchanged our geographical derivations. As the young woman said she had always wanted to see Boston, I could not do less than own that the disappointment of my life was never having seen Iowa. By and by, she asked the young man, who had naturally dropped out of the conversation, if he would not go and hunt up her father, and he presently came back with an old fellow so exactly of my years and of her looks that I had a difficulty in disentangling my consciousness from a tie of kindred. But my contemporary viewed me with an instant of suspicion which I had not experienced from his posterity. He asked, pretty stiffly, if she wanted to go, and she took a fonder leave of me than he. The Van der Doeses turned up in time to break my fall, and they had not quite finished asking me how in the world I had got hold of the Cheese and Churn Trust, when the father returned, with the air of having had it taken out of him by the sunflowery young woman, and said his daughter had been telling him how very kind I had been, and he wanted to thank me. He gave me his card, and when he went the Van der Doeses explained that this was the magnate whose financiering skill is going to embitter our bread to all of us who like butter and cheese with it, and sketched his social career in New York. It could be done briefly, because it had gone no farther than buying a lot worth its width in gold, to build on, and coasting along the shores of society. They added harrowing stories of Western millionaires who had failed to get in, and had gone to Europe to hide their sorrows in the bosom of the aristocracies there; but these Ralsons were inexhaustibly good natured, and the daughter seemed to know how to place the father's money where it would do the most good. She had an instinct or an inspiration concerning the right sort of charities, and if she could find a foothold in Newport, the thing was done. They were very good-natured about it; New York is good-natured about everything; and they were not sorry not to despair of the Ralsons. They did not know who the pretty boy was; perhaps a reminiscence of pre-existence in Iowa (the terms are mine;) or a relation whom Papa Ralson was bringing up to inherit him in the Trust.
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