A Glimpse into Lenox’s Gilded Age

The WWHP’s annual 2011 bus trip, held on Saturday, June 11, was attended by twenty-eight women. Heavy rain fell as we clambered onto the bus with drenched umbrellas, and it continued throughout the morning. The weather did not seem to dampen the spirits of our group, however, and, once settled, WWHP Events Committee chair Judy Finkel circulated two articles for our orientation. Bound for Lenox, we would visit two historic mansions: Edith Wharton’s The Mount and Ventfort Hall, home of Sarah Morgan, sister of financier J. Pierpont Morgan.

Edith Wharton, born Edith Neubold Jones in 1862, was the daughter of George and Lucretia Jones. Her brothers, 16 and 12 years older, were away at boarding school during much of her childhood. Edith was raised by her adoring Doyley, the Irish nursemaid who had raised her younger brother. Edith regarded Doyley as her best friend.

The Joneses, whose ancestors had made their fortunes in real estate, were among the wealthiest, most socially prominent families of 19th century New York. They belonged to the Leisure Class and lived on the income from their inheritances. But New York was in transition during the second half of the 19th century. Survival of the Leisure Class was threatened, its members gradually being displaced by entrepreneurs with a new burst of great wealth and philanthropic and civic objectives for spending it. Edith Wharton later would describe her family as “middle class,” distinguishing them from the grander aristocrats (her forebears), and, equally, from the recent incomers with more money and no pedigree (the entrepreneurs).

Like others in their class the Joneses resisted change. Snobbery, conservatism, fear of alienation, complacency, lack of imagination, and racial and sexual protectionism were ingrained. They tended to be haughty, narrow-minded, superficial, and hostile to intellectual life, art, and literature—to innovation of any kind. Known for their impeccable manners and good taste, they shared strict standards of social conduct and mingled only with one another—writers, not considered gentlemen or perceived as Bohemian or common, were among the outsiders excluded.

The Joneses did a few charities, walks in (Central) Park, and social calls. Most evenings were spent either entertaining or being entertained. They attended the newly fashionable opera, not because they enjoyed music, but to socialize with their friends. Conversation generally was limited to parochial concerns; politics and religion were mentioned within acceptable boundaries; and the subject of war was taboo. The Leisure Class, perpetually on the alert for ill-breeding, essentially practiced “an elaborate policy of social ostracism.” Girls raised during this era were neither expected nor encouraged to think independently or express themselves. Young women were expected only to marry, reproduce, and entertain and, as wives, be subservient to their husbands. Writing for the pleasure of others was not condoned. Any woman deviating from the expected conduct was ridiculed, scorned, or avoided.

The Joneses owned two houses: one in New York and one in Newport, the latter with a smaller 10-room cottage on the premises. Lucretia Jones, a compulsive shopper with grandiose aspirations, was famous for her beautiful Parisian clothes and stylish parties. Edith would recall seeing her father bent over his desk trying to reconcile his narrowing fixed income with her mother’s expenditures. But the Joneses, like their peers, also were victims of economic circumstances beyond their control—the post-war slump in property values. And the Joneses, like many of their friends, rented out their houses and went to live in Europe to economize.

The Joneses lived in Europe between 1866 and 1872. During this period Edith learned to write, read, and speak fluently in Italian, French, and German, and she invented her game of “making up” [stories], the activity that would dominate her childhood. “Making up” initially overlapped with learning to read and was encouraged by Edith’s father. Book in hand often inverted, Edith would turn the pages as if reading, while improvising aloud an imaginary story. Edith’s mother, however, openly disapproved of her daughter’s imaginary dialogues.

When the Joneses returned to New York, Edith was introduced to her father’s library, a room with shelves filled with the classics as well as contemporary books. The library became Edith’s refuge, and, over the next thirteen years, she would read every book her father owned, subject to her mother’s approval. Lucretia Jones, who read only novels and considered their contents inappropriate for unmarried girls, would censor her daughter’s reading material until the day Edith moved out of her mother’s house.

Though private schools for girls were available, Edith was tutored at home. At age 12, she wrote her first story about two women of her mother’s generation, the first woman calling unexpectedly upon the second. The second woman, having politely greeted the first woman, apologized for not having tidied up the drawing room. Edith read the story to her mother, who responded, “Drawing-rooms are always tidy.” and promptly took away her daughter’s writing paper.

Edith was shy, self-conscious, and awkward, —her childhood, sad and lonely. Her brothers teased her about the size of her hands and feet. Her mother ridiculed her vocabulary and her stories. Some mothers of Edith’s peers warned their daughters against reading too much, lest they turn out like “the Jones girl.” Adults gossiped about Edith’s red hair and her paternity.

Edith emulated her father, too busy with his social life to give his daughter the attention she craved—she shared his interest in travel, his love of the arts and architecture, and his prejudices. She kept a diary, as he did. Edith felt closer to her pets than to most people she knew.

“Making up” required concentration and privacy and began to take precedence over Edith’s peer activities. Clearly grounded in the realities of her physical world, her relationship with her parents, and the social life from which she escaped to “make up,” Edith’s stories were based on the lives she imagined for the ladies and gentlemen who came to dinner and later would become the material she would use in the stories and novels she published.

Concerned about their daughter’s passion for study, her obsession with making up stories, and her indifference to peers (and probably her marriage prospects), Edith’s parents introduced her into society in 1879 at age 17, a year earlier than customary—a decision Edith resented. By becoming a debutante, Edith was announcing to the world that she was ready to give up her independence and her doubts. In essence, Edith Jones was exchanging her hopes of becoming a writer for the role of a secure and traditional wife.

Edith began a courtship with Henry (Harry) Stevens in the summer of 1880. Harry’s father, an aggressive self-made businessman whose hobby was breeding race horses, had died in 1872, and Harry was due to inherit a large fortune. Harry proposed, and Edith accepted. Later that summer, Edith accompanied her parents to Europe for the benefit of her father’s health. Together Edith and her father toured Italy, sharing his interest in the places they visited, before he died in 1882 and was buried in Cannes. Edith, now age 20, and her mother returned to New York. That summer Edith and Harry resumed their courtship in Newport. Their engagement, announced in August with wedding date in October, was broken just before the event, and Edith and her mother returned to Paris.

During the summer of 1883 Edith accompanied her mother to Bar Harbor where she met Walter Berry, age 24, and began a relationship that later would dominate the rest of her life. Born in Paris, Berry, a graduate of St. Mark’s School, Harvard, and Columbia, had established a law firm in Washington, D.C. the previous year and was working in international relations. Well read and intellectually challenging, Berry belonged to Edith’s social circle—a kindred spirit who never proposed.

Edith Jones married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, 13 years her senior, in April 1885 after a courtship of 18 months. Teddy, born in 1850, was the youngest son of William and Nancy Wharton. William Wharton came from a large respectable Virginia family, and Nancy, born in Amherst, was of Boston and Philadelphia stock. The family lived on Boston’s Beacon Street and had a modest summer home in Lenox. William Wharton suffered from “melancholia,” and his periodic residence as an inmate at Boston’s asylum McLean became permanent around the time of the Whartons’ wedding.

Although Teddy lacked a grand historical pedigree and shared little in common with Edith other than a fondness for dogs, horses, and travel, he belonged to Edith’s brothers’ sporty Newport and New York set. He had left Harvard after two years, had no job, and would depend upon his mother, Nancy Wharton, for an allowance until he came into his inheritance at age 60.

Establishing intimate, trusting relationships was always difficult for Edith, and her relationship with Teddy Wharton would be no exception. Days before her wedding, a fearful Edith, ignorant about the role of sexual intercourse in marital relationships, had appealed to her mother for information and was rebuked once again. There was no honeymoon. The Whartons moved into the Newport cottage where they lived for eight years under the aegis of Edith’s mother. The Whartons had separate bedrooms; it was three weeks before they consummated their marriage.

Each year between 1886 and 1897 the Whartons spent several winter months in Europe, mostly in Italy with frequent visits to Paris and England during which time Edith dedicated herself to the study of European culture. During summers in Newport, Edith Wharton did as expected—social calls and entertaining, making her life as interesting as she could, as she began to feel her way as a writer. Depressed by the lack of interest in her writing showed by those people to whom she felt closest, Edith became discouraged. She developed psychosomatic problems—bouts of fatigue and headaches, and began to suffer frequent respiratory infections.

In 1888 a distant Jones cousin left Edith a sizable legacy. In 1890 the Whartons bought Land’s End, their summer home in Newport, situated at the opposite end of the island from Edith’s mother’s cottage. Edith would sell Land’s End in 1903. In 1891 they bought a house on Park Avenue in New York and rented it out until 1897 when they moved into what would become their winter New York base until 1905. Working with Boston architect Ogden Codman, the Whartons shared the enthusiasm of renovating and designing their new homes.

In 1897 Charles Scribner agreed to publish Edith Wharton’s first book, co-authored with Ogden Codman, The Decoration of Houses, a new theory of American design, pending substantial revision. Wharton was overwhelmed by the daunting task of organizing the material Codman and she had collected. Upon hearing that Walter Berry had arrived in Newport, Wharton contacted him, and the two resumed their friendship, fourteen years after their initial introduction at Bar Harbor. Berry, lawyer by profession and scholar by inclination, was deeply interested in literature. He was the first person to take an interest in Wharton’s writing. Berry became her mentor and literary advisor. He analyzed, criticized, and praised her work, and the book was published. Though the two would be separated for long periods, their close, affectionate relationship would continue until Berry’s death in 1927.

Edith Wharton was age 37 when she discovered Lenox in the autumn of 1899 on a visit with Teddy, her husband of 14 years, to his widowed mother, Nancy Wharton, at her summer home. Lenox had been a prosperous farming and mill community known for its marble quarries, iron works, and lumber during the 1800’s. Nestled among the hills of Western Massachusetts and once the seat of Berkshire County, this hamlet suddenly was discovered by wealthy and famous New York and Boston residents. Many were writers, artists, or patrons of the arts who previously had retreated to Newport for the summer season and now were drawn to the Berkshires.

Bored with summer life in Newport, the Whartons returned to Lenox in 1900. That summer Wharton chose Laurel Lake Farm, 128 acres of farm-land, wetland, and forests, as the site for her classical villa, the only American house she would build. Together with architect Ogden Codman, Wharton designed The Mount, an American Renaissance house drawn from French, Italian, and English sources, using the principles about which she had written in her book.

Construction of The Mount began during the summer of 1901 with problems between Codman and Teddy Wharton arising almost immediately. Teddy’s behavior had become erratic, and Codman, perhaps the first to recognize that Teddy was unstable, compared Teddy’s “queer traits and strange behavior” to those of his father, William Wharton, who, unknown to Codman and to Lenox residents, had committed suicide in 1891. The Whartons hired architect Francis Hoppin to replace Codman, and the building continued through that year and into the next. In the spring of 1892 Codman was forgiven and rehired as interior designer.

The Mount, an imposing H-shaped, white stucco structure with double Palladian staircases and cupola patterned after a house in England, now standing on approximately 50 acres of land, was built high into the side of a hill with rocks below and a broad vista beyond. It had 35 rooms with 100 windows (some blind to balance real ones). Truly international in design both in- and outside, Edith Wharton’s attention to detail is everywhere. The long drive, lined with sugar-maples, curving through the woods to the semicircular courtyard and the front entrance, was French in feeling. The regularity of the house with its symmetrical features was characteristic of the American design of the period. The green shutters gave an American colonial appearance.

The Italianate grotto-like entrance hall on the ground floor was separated from the staircase to the first floor on the right by a plate glass door kept closed. Visitors were admitted to the living quarters on the first floor only by invitation. Two long parallel structures on the first floor also were Italian in style: the balustrade terrace with its grand staircases leading to the garden below, and the gallery with its vaulted ceiling, terrazzo floors, and the four main rooms opening off it. The plan for the main rooms—dining room, drawing room, library, and den—in a connecting row, however, was a French design. Each room opened onto both the gallery and the terrace so that each one could be entered directly without going through another.

The dining room had fruit and flower plaster-work with large Italian painted still-life panels set into the walls. A round eighteenth-century Italian table accommodating eight people was centered in the room. Off to one side of the table, in front of the windows but partially hidden by a large potted plant, was a small wooden four-poster bed big enough to accommodate a small dog. Electric wall sconces provided artificial light in the room; there was no central ceiling fixture.

The drawing room furniture was arranged in clusters of upholstered sofas and chairs intentionally spaced to encourage intimate conversations between individuals in small groups. The den was formally decorated with elegant rectangular paneling.

The library opened on all sides—to the terrace through French windows, to the gallery, to the drawing room next door, and to the den through a concealed door. The room had a feeling of warmth and orderliness: oak shelves filled with books on three walls, plaster-work ceiling decoration, wall tapestries, marbled fireplace with decorative cast-iron fire-back, hearth surrounded by two armchairs, and a solid desk and caned-back chair centrally placed on an oriental carpet. An autographed copy of President Theodore Roosevelt’s book America and the Great War inscribed to Edith lay open in a display case.

Unlike the décor of the first floor, that of the second floor was plain. The hall doors opened into the Whartons’ separate (but adjoining) bedrooms, two guest rooms, and Edith’s maid’s bedroom. Her maid was the only servant with easy access to her suite. Edith Wharton’s suite—bedroom, bathroom, and boudoir—could be closed off from the rest of the house. Her bedroom windows faced north and east. She liked to write in bed during the morning hours. Her bathroom had a separate door for the servants to move freely without coming through the bedroom. The bedrooms were above the library and den to minimize noise. The Mount, planned for comfort, convenience, and privacy and built for work, leisure, and selected visitors, was functional. The rooms had character and were intended for particular use by particular people.

The service wing with its separate entrance and stairs stretched under the terrace at the south end of the house. An ice box on the ground floor drained into a small sink mounted on an adjacent wall outside the box. Across from the ice box was a hydraulic elevator for moving luggage. The servants’ bedrooms were in the attic.

The formal gardens drew on Wharton’s Italian experience, yet were set above an English-style meadow and in front of an American suburban lawn. The first garden, a symmetrical enclosure with flower beds of intense color, gravel walks, grass panels, topiary, trellis-work, and central oblong pond with a fountain carved with dolphins, was bordered by a hedge of white petunias. The second, a sunken garden, enclosed by fieldstone walls with niches for statues at either end and a round central pond with yet another fountain, was connected to the first garden by “the lime walk,” a straight path walled with linden trees and hemlock hedges.

Closer to the road, the Whartons built a Georgian-style white stucco stable with cupola to match the house, accommodating up to 14 horses and a carriage room, with the coachman’s living quarters above. They were among the first Lenox residents to make space among the horses’ box stalls for a Pope-Hartford automobile.

Teddy was in poor health when the Whartons moved into The Mount in September 1902. In February 1903 they went to Italy for three months and returned in May to spend their first long summer at The Mount, where they would spend the next five summers and autumns. Although fond of each other, the Whartons’ relationship was more like a business partnership than a love affair. Teddy, who had long since spent his own inheritance, contributed to the couple’s economy by managing his wife’s money. He also managed the business of the house and looked after the farm.

Teddy’s favorite pastimes were outdoor sports and motoring, when it became popular. Teddy, bored by art and literature, was unimaginative. He read very little. Who would believe that Teddy did not even bother to read his wife’s work! Teddy Wharton preferred wine to the conversation of Edith Wharton’s intimate intellectual circle of friends.

Edith planted the gardens, laid paths for walks in the woods, played with her dogs—and wrote. She spent as much time as possible with people who shared her interests—editors, publishers, fellow writers, academics, travelling companions. Friends who knew her and whom she entertained at The Mount were imported, visiting in small groups, staying for several days, and falling into a schedule devised by their hostess. The Mount became Edith Wharton’s refuge from her failing marriage and the repressive world of upper class New York society.

Wharton made contributions to the community. She joined the Lenox Village Improvement Committee and the Associate Board of Managers of the Lenox Library, where she helped organize the cataloguing and gave new carpets and books in addition to annual contributions. In exchange, the library gave Wharton the opening scene of her novella Summer. She also furnished a clubroom for the French-speaking residents of Lenoxdale and treated them to a banquet prepared by her chef.

Edith Wharton was on civil but not intimate terms with her neighbors. Though none of Wharton’s novels is autobiographical, she managed to shock the Lenox residents with the use of local material in her published work. Many people avoided her. Lenox was the setting for Wharton’s novella Ethan Frome.

Cunning Mary Mason Jones, widowed aunt by marriage of Edith Wharton’s father, was known to have broken her husband’s will and taken all his money and, together with her sister, built houses in uptown New York on two blocks of land inherited from their banker father. The idiom “keeping up with the Joneses” is said to have been coined in reference to this great aunt of Edith Wharton. Mrs. Mason Jones is dramatized as Mrs. Manson Mingott in Wharton’s novella The Old Maid, and Wharton’s own mother, Lucretia Jones, is dramatized as Charlotte in the same book.

Teddy’s health continued to deteriorate, and by 1908 their marriage had failed. Edith moved to France, leaving Teddy to manage the property. Instead, he speculated with the money Edith left for the upkeep of The Mount, losing most of it. Teddy came into his inheritance at age 59 after the death of his mother, Nancy Wharton, in the summer of 1909. He bought an apartment in Boston and set up a mistress in it. Teddy repaid his debt in full to Edith when she returned to Lenox for the last time in 1910. Edith sold the Park Avenue house, the Whartons’ New York winter home, in 1910. She sold The Mount in 1911 and returned to France. She would return to the United States only once more in 1923.

Edith Wharton wanted a divorce from Teddy in Paris to avoid publicity, but she had to prove to the French court that he had committed adultery. She wrote to journalist and writer Morton Fullerton, requesting that he return the letters she had written to him. Perhaps no one knew of their affair during the years between 1907 and 1910. Wharton had burned Fullerton’s letters to her as soon as the affair was over. The entitled, arrogant Fullerton, however, merely wrote back, saying “the letters survive,” and survive they did. Fullerton’s letters were discovered when Wharton’s papers left to Yale were opened in 1968 [How she would have hated that!]

Edith Wharton was granted a divorce in absentia in 1913. That done, she surrendered her right to claim anything Teddy Wharton owned in return for her full right to the name of Wharton—her professional name. Her legal name thereafter was Edith Neubold Wharton. Teddy Wharton died in 1927 at the age of 77.

During the years between 1914 and 1918, Edith Wharton solicited money from her contacts in America and organized and administered multiple charities for the Allies. She befriended many French women and children displaced by the war. She also collected recyclable materials and recruited recently unemployed women to make useful commodities from the collected materials which they would then sell to help support the charities. Wharton’s life during the war was one of hard work and dedication, but also one of special treatment, connections in high places, and servants to run errands. Walter Berry, now Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce’s Publications and Press committee in France, made sure Wharton had enough rationed petrol to get around in her car.

Wharton volunteered to observe and to write about conditions in the war zone. She made many trips to the front lines and wrote vivid newspaper accounts and magazine articles for people in America. She wrote to arouse emotions and to encourage America’s intervention, and, in her fiction, about the war’s brutality, cowardice, and bereavement. Her short story The Marne was published in 1915, and her novel A Son at the Front would be published in 1923.

Edith Wharton wrote prolifically—42 books in 40 years. Her books included edited anthologies, collections of poetry and short stories, plays, novels and novellas, translations, authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel, and one autobiography. She was working on four novels simultaneously in the years between 1907 and 1912. Edith Wharton was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1921, the first woman to be elevated to full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the first woman to receive an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Yale in 1923. Edith Wharton died following a stroke in 1937 at age 75 and was buried next to Walter Berry in the American Cemetery in Versailles. She left behind four unpublished manuscripts, including a second autobiography.

To say that Edith Wharton was a remarkable woman would be an understatement. Edith Wharton has touched the lives of many people, young and old, both here in America and abroad with her written work. That, I think, coupled with her sense of humor, is perhaps the best legacy she could have left us.

Our tour of The Mount over, the rain had slowed to a drizzle, and our group members could be seen wandering among the gardens, some trying to identify the plantings. Soon we were back on the bus, headed for nearby Ventfort Hall.

VENTFORT HALL

J. Ogden Haggerty, wealthy New York City merchant and patron of the arts, and his wife Elizabeth bought 18 acres of land in 1853 and built an Italian-style “summer cottage” named Vent Fort (Strong Wind). Haggerty’s daughter Annie and her husband Colonel Robert Gould Shaw honeymooned at Vent Fort for seven days following their New York City wedding on May 2, 1863. The couple then moved to Boston and lived in a boarding house near Camp Readville in Hyde Park where the 54th Regiment was training. Three months earlier, Shaw, the only son of Boston abolitionists Francis Gould and Sarah Shaw, had declined Massachusetts Governor John Andrew’s offer to command one of the first African American infantry units in the Union Army. Shaw ultimately accepted the commission to please his mother.

Three weeks after the wedding Colonel Shaw paraded his troops through Boston to the docks where they sailed for South Carolina. On July 18, 1863, Shaw and his troops were among the units that led the assault on Battery Wagner, part of Charleston’s defenses. Shaw, age 26, was killed. The Confederate general refused to return Shaw’s body to the Union Army and, to show contempt, buried him with his fallen men in a common trench. Amidst national out-cry, Shaw’s family, including Annie, chose not to move Shaw’s body. Annie would never see the memorial to her husband erected on the Boston Commons.

Sarah Spencer Morgan, sister of financier J. Pierpont Morgan, purchased Vent Fort from the Haggerty family in 1891. Husband George Hale Morgan persuaded Sarah to move Vent Fort across the street (The house would burn to the ground in 1965.) and the couple built a Jacobean Revival mansion on the site. Ventfort Hall is one of many similar Berkshire “Cottages” erected in the area during the era known as The Gilded Age, the period between the Civil War and World War I. Brick with brownstone, a covered front entrance, and a veranda along its entire rear length, the mansion was completed in 1893. The “cottage” had a three-story great hall, billiard room, and bowling alley, in addition to more than 28 other rooms, and was designed with all the latest amenities—ventilated bathrooms, combined gas and electric light fixtures, burglar alarms, and central heating. (George Westinghouse lived down the road!) Ventfort Hall now stands on 11.7 acres of landscaped garden.

Following the deaths of Sarah and George, Ventfort Hall was rented for several years and then sold to a succession of buyers. A developer bought the property in the mid-1980’s and subsequently proposed to demolish the vandalized mansion and build a nursing home on the site. In 1994, the Ventfort Hall Association, a local preservation group, was formed in protest. The VHA purchased the property in 1997 with private donations and loans, including a 5-year loan from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Ventfort Hall is now the home of The Museum of the Gilded Age.

Last year the VHA embarked on an ambitious restoration project. Working with two preserved household inventories from 1896 and 1911, the few remaining 19th century interior photos, and scraps of the original wall paper, the VHA reconstructed the master bedroom as it had existed during the 15 years of Morgan ownership. Today the mansion is used as a venue for programs including lectures, tea parties, ballroom dancing, and chamber concerts.

The museum currently has two exhibits. The Les Petites Dames de Mode, the exhibit of octogenarian John R. Burbidge’s extraordinary collection of 59 miniature fashion models, portrays the history of women’s fashions from 1855 to 1914. Burbidge, retired Senior Designer of bridal house Priscilla of Boston, began work on his creation of “ladies” almost 30 years ago. Each 29-inch “lady,” dressed in a period outfit, utterly exquisite in every detail, was designed and hand-made by Burbidge himself.

The exhibit In Celebration of Weddings features both Burbidge’s work and that of his wife, Cile Bellefleur Burbidge. A sixtieth Burbidge “lady” is outfitted in a replica of the wedding dress, complete with train, worn by Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York. Also exhibited are photos and memorabilia of wedding dresses Burbidge created for Presidents Johnson’s and Nixon’s daughters. Mrs. Burbidge, world-acclaimed for her award-winning wedding cakes, has contributed an indescribably beautiful cake for display. Burbidge’s cakes retail for thousands of dollars and have appeared at the Smithsonian, Tiffany’s, and weddings for heads of state.

References

Dwight, E. (1994). Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Guilder, C. B., with Peters, J. C. (2008). Hawthorne’s Lenox. Charleston: The History Press.

Leach, W. (1987). Edith Wharton. New York: Chelsea House.

Lee, H. (2007). Edith Wharton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Strouse, J. (1999). Morgan: American Financier. New York: Random House.

Tucker, G. H. (1992). A History of Lenox. Unpublished manuscript written 1936. Lenox Library Association.

Wharton, E. (1934). A Backward Glance. New York: D. Appleton-Century.