Three Vassar Girls Excerpts
From VCencylopedia
An Excerpt from Three Vassar Girls in France, 1888:
An omnibus was waiting at the station, which conveyed our tourists through the village, past lovely landscapes, through the park gates; for Mere Babette's dove-cot was one of the buildings on a farm belonging to the Rothschild estate. Sallie had an opportunity of viewing the exterior of the great chateau which Baron Rothschild has built on the site of an old castle of the Montmorency's. The guidebook told her that the architecture was in bad taste; but for all that, it had an imposing effect quit in harmony with the great banker's fortunes, and she could readily believe the driver when he told her that besides the part of the building reserved for the family, the chateau contained "eighty complete suites of apartments for as many guests, and sables for one hundred horses."
"How delightful to be able to dispense such princely hospitality!" Sallie murmured; and then she thought of simple Matthew Vassar, with his three hundred guest-rooms, and added, "but I have been for four years the guest of an American who entertained more royally than that."
An Excerpt from Three Vassar Girls in England, 1884:
“There is to be a grand lawn-party at Chatsworth next week to begin with, which we cannot escape. Cousin Dick is coming up from Oxford to attend it, and even Tom, who scarcely ever leaves his business at the Royal Porcelain works, is to be here. That will be our debut, and after that I fear Aunt Atchison will get up some minor festivities on her own account. I besought her not to do so. I told her we were very simple in our tastes, and would much prefer that she should not make a fuss over us. The two quiet days that we have spent in this rambling old house have been more than delightful. I am afraid they are too good to last. Harry is only a boy of sixteen and a good-natured and endurable young fellow, but I confess that I dread the coming of my older cousins, though we may congratulate clergymen and dowagers, and old squires, and narrow-minded women that we will have to meet! Their patronage of America will be even worse than their downright rudeness. I think we have an innate prejudice against the English, and they against us. It is as intense and as irrational as our longing to snap torpedoes on Fourth of July, and perhaps the feeling and the custom date back to a common origin.”
“I am glad that you recognize the feeling as prejudice,” replied Cecilia, familiarly called Saint. “I who was born under the shadow of Bunker Hill have no such vindictive feeling. If I had lived at the time of the Revolution I have no doubt my blood would have been stirred by the reverberations of the great guns; but this popping of crackers and international squibs of criticism seem to me alike childish.”
“What I find particularly galling,” continued Barbara,” is the fact that the English are so supercilious. They fancy that they understand us perfectly, while they have not the remotest conception of what Americans really are.”
“I can pardon the arrogance which comes form misconception.” remarked Maud; “what I find absolutely incomprehensible in their lack of taste. Do you remember how those English women in Paris used to dress? They were the laughing-stock of the French. Five shades of purple in one costume, and crimson and magenta married most unlovingly in another gown, while a Paisley scarf with a vermilion centre completed the horror.”
“I thought the aesthetic craze had put an end to such atrocities.”
“Yes, their artists are teaching new and better ideas, but Oscar Wilde, and Patience, and Du Maurier’s caricatures in Punch show us to what an extreme they are carrying the new fashion. I am more and more convinced that the English as a nation area utterly tasteless.”
Saint laughed merrily. “Girls,” she exclaimed, “if any one needs to have their impressions corrected, I am sure you do. I foretell that before we have passed three months in England both of you will dote on the English. I believe that all antagonism comes from the imperfect knowledge. What could be kinder than the reception that we have received here? Mrs. Atchison, too, dresses neither in violent purples nor in dirty greens, but in conventional black. We ought to remember also that we are English ourselves, only a few generations removed, and I for one am ready to believe that all English people are agreeable, could we thoroughly know them.”
