The Sunday herald and weekly national intelligencer., 1891-04-12
pEDrGREE AGAINST pEnF.
How Gotham's Pre-Revolutionary People
Get the Bulge on the New Rich.

How Gotham's Pre-Revolutionary People
Get the Bulge the New-Rich.
Van Gryse in the ArGonaut.
1t is great thing now to have family that
has had something to do with the Revolution
There is a perfect craze for the Revolution.
Old people who remember having seen Lafay-
cite and Aaron Burr are more in demand than
English buffers or foreign mobiles. To possess
few Revolutionary relics, such as spinning
wheels, tankards, or 'the gun that Granther
Young brought home from Concord busted'' is
to be the success of the day.
The people who have come down from Revo-
lutionary days are booming themselves. On
lockers say the cause lies in the fact that the
ancestral party feel they are being pushed back
against the wall by the millionaire party. For
the last ten years members of the ancestral
party who have been little Strengthened for
means have not been in it at all. Some of their
women got asked about and made much of be-
cause they happened to be pretty and brilliant,
but most of them were calmly elbowed out of
the road by the millionaire party, which sim
ply tramped over everything that stood in its
way.
The ancestral party managed to keep cool
in the face of this high-handed treatment
comforting themselves with that consolatory
remark: sPoor things, they don't know any
better What can one expect from pork
packers and aXle-grease people +" But now,
even this reflection fails to cheer. The pork
packers and axle-grease people have got every
thing their own way When the ancestral
party closed the doors of their clubs the
millionaire party started clubs of their own,
gorgeously exclusive. When the ancestral
women would not go to the millionaire
women's parties. the millionaire women, who
were good-looking and well-dressed and at
tractive and wealthy, got all the men to be
had and married the best of thl. The an
cestral women set at home in the high-ceiled,
dim, exclusive parlors, and had the satisfac-
tion of seeing their brothers and cousins
desert In body for the gay and dazzling halls
of their moneyed enemies.
Now, the ancestral party can swallow this
no longer, and they have hoisted the battle
flag by blossoming out into series of female
societies, into which none but ladiesof pre-
revolutionary ancestry can be admitted. "I'm
going to have something that you can't
have''-that's the idea. Time will show with
what dire revenge the frustrated million
airesses will cool their ire at this turning of
the worm. There is no doubt about it, they
are calmly and successfully frozen out Some
one, the other day, in a magazine article, said
that women were the real snobs. This looks
somewhat like it. a.1s
The first blossoming is called "The Colonial
Danes" They meet and drink tea and give
entertainments, and wear their ancestors
gowns, and feel and look lovely and distin-
guished. They have scored little triumph in
little way, for good many of them are Gel
ebrated beauties, and where beauty gathers, SO
do men, and where men and beauty meet ''to
speed the glowing hours with fying tieet,n
there will he beautiful times and brilliant do
ings and lots of fun for every one. The Colo
nial Danes have shown themselves possessed
of rather more sharpness than usually accom-
panies long pedigree. They have worked
out their sweet little revenge with truly Ma
chiavelian acuteness. All the pretty Colonial
| DANES, who, being short as to funds, were
languishing in dreary back-parlors and front
| reception-rooms, growing pale and pasS6, with
| no one to pay passing tribute to their
beauty, have now chance to let the world see
them, lovely, lily-like, patrcian, delicate,
| fgged out in the full glory of great-grand-
mammals wedding -great-grandmam-
| ma, who married that British officer who after
| ward joined the forces of ''our glorious reb-
| els"
The society is presided over by some ex-
| tremely stunning women. There are good
many Duers in it, and the Duers have been
famous, since the days of Lady Kitty of that
| ilk, for the beauty of the women and the good
manners OF the men. The family Is large
| now, but originally sprung from Lady Kitty
| Duer, the daughter of Lord Sterling. Lady
| Kitty was beauty In the days of British
| sovereignty and afterward a light of Wash
| ington's circle. That severe warrior, who is
said to have been man of taste, was himself
| quite fascinated by the dashing Kitty and
| her captivating ways. 1t was she who,
| at one of the Presidential receptions,
| nearly put au end to her beauty and
| her gayety by leaning her head too
| close toa unprotected lamp, whereat all the
| tower of feathers which decked her coiffure
| went up in flame and came near extnguishng
Lady Kitty's light forever. Her modern de-
scendants are true to the family tradition.
They are all handsome and all well-man-
nered-the women are small, dark, and ethe-
real, the sort of women to whom summer is
becoming, and who look well in frilled and
| furbelowed gowns and fixings 1t is said of
them that they have the best manners in New
York. They are certainly most refined and
| polished in their style, but they have the lack
| of vitality which one SO often notices in the
| descendants of an old stock