New York - The Novel

of.
    “I’ll wait for you in the car,” she declared, and indicated to the chauffeur that he should escort the two old ladies in. But it was no use.
    “Oh you can’t do that, dear,” said Hetty. “He knows you’re bringing us. That would seem awfully rude.”
    So a few minutes later, she found herself in the pleasant office of an athletic man in his late twenties, with dark brown hair and bright blue eyes, who had placed three armchairs before his desk, and was clearly delighted to see them.
    “Welcome to my lair,” said Mr. Edmund Keller with a pleasant smile. There were bookshelves round the walls, a print of the
Mona Lisa
, and a photograph of Niagara Falls, taken by his father. A glance at the books revealed that he was a classical scholar and historian. Rose allowed herself to be introduced, then tactfully kept silent.
    “Lily and I saw your father only the other day,” Hetty declared. “He stopped round at my house for tea.”
    Rose let them chatter. She remembered that Theodore Keller lived on East Nineteenth Street, only a stone’s throw from Gramercy Park, and she knew of course that old Frank Master had been the photographer’s patron. And that was all well and good. But his son was another matter entirely. She’d heard what kind of character young Mr. Edmund Kellerwas, and she’d heard it from an unimpeachable source. To be exact, from no less a person than the president of Columbia University himself.
    Nicholas Murray Butler was a very impressive man. He was a distinguished academic, internationalist and political figure. President Theodore Roosevelt called him a friend, and his views were as sound as they were conservative. Everybody said he was doing great things with Columbia. So if he had suspicions about young Mr. Keller, you could be sure it was for a very good reason.
    She’d met Mr. Butler at a gala, and they’d chatted quite a while. She always took care to keep informed about everything that was going on in the city, so she’d listened carefully as he told her about the improvements he was making up at the university. They’d got along rather well. When she asked him if he was satisfied with the students applying, he’d answered yes, before adding in a low voice: “Perhaps too many Jews, though.”
    Rose hadn’t anything against Jews herself. Some of the most notable men in New York—people like the great banker Schiff, whom even Morgan held in high regard—were Jewish and one met them socially. The old German Jewish families that lived on the Upper West Side, or in the pleasant suburb of Harlem now, were often highly respectable.
    Of course, the masses of poor Jews who had flooded into the Lower East Side during the last quarter-century were quite another matter. One felt sorry for them, naturally—they’d been fleeing those terrible pogroms in Russia and places like that. But such people. She’d seen them, of course, in that noisy, bustling quarter, and she couldn’t imagine that they would provide the genteel young men that Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler would want.
    “Don’t misunderstand me,” he’d continued. “I have distinguished Jewish professors, and we take in plenty of Jewish boys. But I have to limit the numbers, or they’ll swamp the place.”
    It was then, trying to think of something else to say, and remembering she’d heard that Theodore Keller’s son was teaching at Columbia, that she’d mentioned his name. And she’d been quite surprised when Butler’s brow had darkened.
    “You know him?” he’d asked.
    “Not personally.”
    “Hmm.” He’d hesitated. “He is entitled to his opinions, of course, but I may have some political differences with him.”
    “Oh? Serious ones?”
    Again he’d paused. “Well, I go only by things he has said in public, but I have the impression—no, I must say that I believe—that Edmund Keller’s views are socialistic.”
    Rose Master did not know a great deal about socialists. One heard about them, of course, in places like Russia, and even in more familiar European countries, too. Socialists, communists, anarchists, revolutionaries. People who had no respect for private property. People without roots, or morals. She remembered something a British politician had told her at a dinner party, when she and William had made their visit to London. “These people would take away every individual freedom we have. They call us capitalists, whatever that may mean, and say our capitalism is evil. That is their