The Booming of Acre Hill And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life

MR. AUGUSTUS RICHARDS’S IDEAL

Mr. Augustus Richards was thirty years of age and unmarried.  He could afford to marry, and he had admired many women, but none of them came up to his ideals.  Miss Fotheringay, for instance, represented his notions as to what a woman should be physically, but intellectually he found her wofully below his required standard.  She was tall and stately—­Junoesque some people called her—­but in her conversation she was decidedly flippant.  She was interested in all the small things of life, but for the great ones she had no inclination.  She preferred a dance with a callow youth to a chat with a man of learning.  She worshipped artificial in-door life, but had no sympathy with nature.  The country she abominated, and her ideas of rest consisted solely in a change of locality, which was why she went to Newport every summer, there to indulge in further routs and dances when she wearied of the routs and dances of New York.

Miss Patterson, on the other hand, represented to the fullest degree the intellectual standard Mr. Augustus Richards had set up for the winner of his affections.  She was fond of poetry and of music.  She was a student of letters, and a clever talker on almost all the arts and sciences in which Mr. Augustus Richards delighted.  But, alas! physically she was not what he could admire.  She was small and insignificant in appearance.  She was pallid-faced, and, it must be confessed, extremely scant of locks; and the idea of marrying her was to Mr. Augustus Richards little short of preposterous.  Others, there were, too, who attracted him in some measure, but who likewise repelled him in equal, if not greater measure.

What he wanted Mrs. Augustus Richards to be was a composite of the best in the beautiful Miss Fotheringay, the intellectual Miss Patterson, the comfortably rich but extremely loud Miss Barrows, with a dash of the virtues of all the others thrown in.

For years he looked for such a one, but season after season passed away and the ideal failed to materialize, as unfortunately most ideals have a way of doing, and hither and yon Mr. Augustus Richards went unmarried, and, as society said, a hopelessly confirmed old bachelor—­more’s the pity.