M.,
and MATINEES DANSANTES were regularly given at the hotels, our
grandmothers appearing in DECOLLETE muslin frocks adorned with
broad sashes, and disporting themselves gayly until the dinner
hour. Low-neck dresses were the rule, not only for these informal
entertainments, but as every-day wear for young girls, - an old
lady only the other day telling me she had never worn a "high-body"
until after her marriage. Two o'clock found all the beauties and
beaux dining. How incredulously they would have laughed if any one
had prophesied that their grandchildren would prefer eight forty-
five as a dinner hour!
The opening of Bellevue Avenue marked another epoch in the history
of Newport. About that time Governor Lawrence bought the whole of
Ochre Point farm for fourteen thousand dollars, and Mr. de Rham
built on the newly opened road the first "cottage," which stands
to-day modestly back from the avenue opposite Perry Street. If
houses have souls, as Hawthorne averred, and can remember and
compare, what curious thoughts must pass through the oaken brain of
this simple construction as it sees its marble neighbors rearing
their vast facades among trees. The trees, too, are an innovation,
for when the de Rham cottage was built and Mrs. Cleveland opened
her new house at the extreme end of Rough Point (the second summer
residence in the place) it is doubtful if a single tree broke the
rocky monotony of the landscape from the Ocean House to Bateman's
Point.
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