" Existence in the
commodious Tillotson mansion in Fifth Avenue--with Mrs. Tillotson senior
commanding the approaches from the second-story front windows--had been
reduced to a series of purely automatic acts. The moral atmosphere of the
Tillotson interior was as carefully screened and curtained as the house
itself: Mrs. Tillotson senior dreaded ideas as much as a draught in her
back. Prudent people liked an even temperature; and to do anything
unexpected was as foolish as going out in the rain. One of the chief
advantages of being rich was that one need not be exposed to unforeseen
contingencies: by the use of ordinary firmness and common sense one could
make sure of doing exactly the same thing every day at the same hour.
These doctrines, reverentially imbibed with his mother's milk, Tillotson
(a model son who had never given his parents an hour's anxiety)
complacently expounded to his wife, testifying to his sense of their
importance by the regularity with which he wore goloshes on damp days, his
punctuality at meals, and his elaborate precautions against burglars and
contagious diseases. Lydia, coming from a smaller town, and entering New
York life through the portals of the Tillotson mansion, had mechanically
accepted this point of view as inseparable from having a front pew in
church and a parterre box at the opera. All the people who came to the
house revolved in the same small circle of prejudices. It was the kind of
society in which, after dinner, the ladies compared the exorbitant charges
of their children's teachers, and agreed that, even with the new duties on
French clothes, it was cheaper in the end to get everything from Worth;
while the husbands, over their cigars, lamented municipal corruption, and
decided that the men to start a reform were those who had no private
interests at stake.
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