Produced by Pat Castevans and David Widger
By Winston Churchill
As the name of our city grew to be more and more a byword for sudden andfabulous wealth, not only were the Huns and the Slavs, the Czechs and theGreeks drawn to us, but it became the fashion for distinguishedEnglishmen and Frenchmen and sometimes Germans and Italians to pay us avisit when they made the grand tour of America. They had been told thatthey must not miss us; scarcely a week went by in our community—so itwas said—in which a full-fledged millionaire was not turned out. Ourvisitors did not always remain a week,—since their rapid journeyingsfrom the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to the Gulf rarely occupiedmore than four,—but in the books embodying their mature comments on themanners, customs and crudities of American civilization no less than achapter was usually devoted to us; and most of the adjectives in theirvarious languages were exhausted in the attempt to prove how symptomaticwe were of the ambitions and ideals of the Republic. The fact that manyof these gentlemen—literary and otherwise—returned to their own shoresbetter fed and with larger balances in the banks than when they departedis neither here nor there. Egyptians are proverbially created to bespoiled.
The wiser and more fortunate of these travellers and students of lifebrought letters to Mr. and Mrs. Hambleton Durrett. That household wassymptomatic—if they liked—of the new order of things; and it was rareindeed when both members of it were at home to entertain them. If Mr.Durrett were in the city, and they did not happen to be Britons withsporting proclivities, they simply were not entertained: when Mrs.Durrett received them dinners were given in their honour on the Durrettgold plate, and they spent cosey and delightful hours conversing with herin the little salon overlooking the garden, to return to their hotels andjot down paragraphs on the superiority of the American women over themen. These particular foreigners did not lay eyes on Mr. Durrett, who wasin Florida or in the East playing polo or engaged in some other pursuit.One result of the lavishness and luxury that amazed them they wrote—hadbeen to raise the standard of culture of the women, who were our leisureclass. But the travellers did not remain long enough to arrive at anyconclusions of value on the effect of luxury and lavishness on the sacredinstitution of marriage.
If Mr. Nathaniel Durrett could have returned to his native city afterfifteen years or so in the grave, not the least of the phenomena tostartle him would have been that which was taking place in his own house.For he would have beheld serenely established in that former abode ofCalvinism one of the most reprehensible of exotic abominations, a'mariage de convenance;' nor could he have failed to observe, moreover,the complacency with which the descendants of his friends, the pewholders in Dr. Pound's church, regarded the matter: and not only these,but the city at large. The stronghold of Scotch Presbyterianism hadbecome a London or a Paris, a Gomorrah!
Mrs. Hambleton Durrett went her way, and Mr. Durrett his. The less saidabout Mr. Durrett's way—even in this suddenly advanced age—the better.As for Nancy, she seemed to the distant eye to be walking through life ina stately and triumphant manner. I read in the newspapers of her doings,her comings and goings; sometimes she was away for months together, oftenabroad; and when she was at home I saw her, but infrequently, underconditions more or less formal. Not that she was formal,—or I: ourintercourse seemed eloquent of