One of the up-state rural counties pointed with pride to the
successful young metropolitan lawyer as a product of its soil. Six
years earlier this county had removed the wheat straw from between
its huckleberry-stained teeth and emitted a derisive and bucolic
laugh as old man Walmsley's freckle-faced "Bob" abandoned the certain
three-per-diem meals of the one-horse farm for the discontinuous
quick lunch counters of the three-ringed metropolis. At the end of
the six years no murder trial, coaching party, automobile accident or
cotillion was complete in which the name of Robert Walmsley did not
figure. Tailors waylaid him in the street to get a new wrinkle from
the cut of his unwrinkled trousers. Hyphenated fellows in the clubs
and members of the oldest subpoenaed families were glad to clap him
on the back and allow him three letters of his name.
But the Matterhorn of Robert Walmsley's success was not scaled until
he married Alicia Van Der Pool. I cite the Matterhorn, for just so
high and cool and white and inaccessible was this daughter of the
old burghers. The social Alps that ranged about her over whose bleak
passes a thousand climbers struggled--reached only to her knees. She
towered in her own atmosphere, serene, chaste, prideful, wading in no
fountains, dining no monkeys, breeding no dogs for bench shows. She
was a Van Der Pool. Fountains were made to play for her; monkeys were
made for other people's ancestors; dogs, she understood, were created
to be companions of blind persons and objectionable characters who
smoked pipes.
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