Miss Vance was there because she united
in her catholic sympathies or ambitions the objects of the fashionable
people and of the aesthetic people who met there on common ground. It was
almost the only house in New York where this happened often, and it did
not happen very often there. It was a literary house, primarily, with
artistic qualifications, and the frequenters of it were mostly authors
and artists; Wetmore, who was always trying to fit everything with a
phrase, said it was the unfrequenters who were fashionable. There was
great ease there, and simplicity; and if there was not distinction, it
was not for want of distinguished people, but because there seems to be
some solvent in New York life that reduces all men to a common level,
that touches everybody with its potent magic and brings to the surface
the deeply underlying nobody. The effect for some temperaments, for
consciousness, for egotism, is admirable; for curiosity, for hero
worship, it is rather baffling. It is the spirit of the street
transferred to the drawing-room; indiscriminating, levelling, but
doubtless finally wholesome, and witnessing the immensity of the place,
if not consenting to the grandeur of reputations or presences.
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