New York - The Novel

St. Patrick’s loomed ahead on their right. As they reached the Fifties, and the new hotels rose into the sky by the Vanderbilt mansions, Hetty observed that everything in the city seemed to be getting very tall. “I’m surprised you like living up here with all these hotels,” she said.
    “We’re in a side street,” said Rose.
    “I know,” said Hetty. “All the same …” At her request, they went west across Fifty-seventh Street. This took them past the fine concert hall that Mr. Carnegie, the steel magnate, had financed. The new millionaires might not always be elegant, but they certainly knew how to support the arts. “I was at the opening gala,” Hetty reminded her. “Tchaikovsky himself conducted.”
    Soon after that, they were bowling up Central Park West. It was looking increasingly handsome these days. The Dakota had company: its sleeker sister, the Langham, was now on the next block up. Other splendid buildings also stared across the park.
    At the Dakota, Lily de Chantal was already waiting downstairs. The years had been good to her; she still looked handsome. The two womenembraced, and sat in the back seat together, while Rose moved to the front beside the chauffeur.
    “We’ll go to Riverside Drive first,” said Hetty.
    The Upper West Side might not be so fashionable, but it had many fine streets. On West End Avenue, there were houses with wide reception halls, splendid curving staircases, and music rooms or libraries. Some of the apartment buildings were truly magnificent—in one place, an exquisite facade that might have come from gothic Flanders, only stacked twice as high; in another, a huge, rusticated, red-brick block, big as a castle, and crowned with the bulbous mansards of France’s belle époque. The people who lived there—doctors, professors, owners of middle-sized businesses—paid a lot less than the people across the park, and lived very well indeed. But it was as they came to the high and magnificent sweep of Riverside Drive above the Hudson, that Hetty exclaimed: “There. That’s what I wanted to see.”
    The sight before them, it had to be said, was quite extraordinary. The house had only just been completed. Its magnificent grounds occupied an entire block, and overlooked the Hudson far below.
    It was a French Renaissance chateau, built in limestone, with turrets, and it contained seventy-five rooms. Even the biggest mansions of Fifth, because of their cramped sites, looked bourgeois by comparison. Its owner, Mr. Charles Schwab, having the boldness and intelligence to realize that the city’s greatest asset was the magnificent view over the Hudson River, and ignoring timid fashion entirely, had, like a true prince, built his mansion where he liked. They might not know it, but he had left them—Astors, Vanderbilts, everyone, save maybe Pierpont Morgan—far behind. His former boss and partner, Andrew Carnegie, said it all. “Have you seen Charlie’s place? Makes mine look like a shack.”
    They stopped the Rolls for several minutes in front of the gateway to admire the place. Rose had to confess that, West Side or not, it was something to talk about.
    “Now,” Hetty announced, “we’ll go up to Columbia University.” She smiled. “We’re going to pay a call on young Mr. Keller.”
    “Mr. Keller?” Rose’s face fell.
    “Why yes, dear. My friend Theodore Keller’s son. He’s expecting us.”
    “Oh,” said Rose. And she looked thoughtful. She did not want to see Mr. Keller, of Columbia. She did not want to see him at all.
    The journey up Riverside Drive was beautiful. They passed several people on bicycles. For it was all the rage these days to ride up to the great mausoleum over the Hudson where Ulysses Grant and his wife were now entombed.
    “I wish I could do that,” Hetty remarked.
    Before getting that far, they turned east, passed by the site where the mighty Anglican cathedral of St. John the Divine was arising, and came to the campus.
    Columbia University was already a college of some antiquity. Having begun its life downtown in the mid-eighteenth century, as the mainly Anglican King’s College, it had later changed its name, relocated to mid-town, and only a decade ago moved once more, to the splendid site at 115th and Broadway. The campus was already handsome; indeed, the broad dome of the Low Library that presided over it could have graced Harvard or Yale.
    It was now, as they pulled up, that Rose tried the only ploy she could think