Others had made the same attempt, and there was a
household of Blenkers--an intense and voluble mother,
and three blowsy daughters who imitated her--where
one met Edwin Booth and Patti and William Winter,
and the new Shakespearian actor George Rignold, and
some of the magazine editors and musical and literary
critics.

Mrs. Archer and her group felt a certain timidity
concerning these persons. They were odd, they were
uncertain, they had things one didn't know about in
the background of their lives and minds. Literature and
art were deeply respected in the Archer set, and Mrs.
Archer was always at pains to tell her children how
much more agreeable and cultivated society had been
when it included such figures as Washington Irving,
Fitz-Greene Halleck and the poet of "The Culprit Fay."
The most celebrated authors of that generation had
been "gentlemen"; perhaps the unknown persons who
succeeded them had gentlemanly sentiments, but their
origin, their appearance, their hair, their intimacy with
the stage and the Opera, made any old New York
criterion inapplicable to them.

"When I was a girl," Mrs. Archer used to say, "we
knew everybody between the Battery and Canal Street;
and only the people one knew had carriages. It was
perfectly easy to place any one then; now one can't tell,
and I prefer not to try."