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none of you are with me to enjoy it, it would be very nearly perfect in its way. Not, I think, “our way” for that means life for an end . But this for the mere pleasure of living is the only life.
    He found it necessary to justify his trip—“There seemed little for me to do in New York that any of you my own people could be proud of me for, and naturally I am an awfully lazy fellow”—and he faced his return to New York with some anxiety.
    I know Sister Anna will keep her eyes open and about her for chances for the boy. If some of the wise and strong among you don’t make a good chance for me on my coming home I’ll make but a poor one for myself I fear. . . .
    But fate now intervened in the form of a sparkling debutante, Anna Rebecca Hall.
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    * Holograph letter in Halsted File at Franklin D. Roosevelt Library with spelling and punctuation as in the original.

2.HER MOTHER
    E LLIOTT WENT INTO REAL ESTATE ON HIS RETURN FROM I NDIA , and even though he dutifully reported to his office on lower Broadway his real life was as man-about-town. Because of his Himalayan exploits he seemed more glamorous than ever and had a kind of Guardsman masculinity that captivated young and old alike. He had the ability when talking with you, said Fanny Parsons, a friend of Corinne’s, of shutting out the rest of the world and making you feel as if you were the most important thing to him.
    If he noticed me at all I had received an accolade, and if on occasion he turned on all his charm, he seemed to me quite irresistible. But all the time I knew that his real worship was at the shrine of some mature and recognized belle of the day.
    The leading debutante the winter Elliott returned was Anna Hall. He described her excitedly as “a tall slender fair-haired little beauty—just out and a great belle.”
    Anna, then almost nineteen, was the eldest of four Hall sisters. All four—Anna, Elizabeth (Tissie), Edith (Pussie), and Maude—were society belles, and all were considered slightly but attractively mad. Anna was the most competent, and she was also a little cold. Elliott was all spontaneity and tenderness, while beneath her youth and beauty Anna was a creature of rules and form. She belonged to Edith Wharton’s “old New York,” an ordered and hierarchical society “which could enjoy with discrimination but had lost the power to create.”
    The Halls were descendants of the landed Livingstons and Ludlows, and their Tivoli home on the Hudson was on property originally deeded to the lords of Livingston Manor through letters patent of Charles II, James II, and George I. The marriage of Anna’s father, Valentine G. Hall, Jr., and her mother, Mary Livingston Ludlow, represented a merger of a wealthy mercantile family of New York Citywith the landed gentry of the Hudson. The first Ludlow had settled in New York in 1640, and as early as 1699 a Ludlow was one of provincial notables, meaning men of property, and had sat as a member of the Assembly of the Province of New York. The Ludlow social standing, patriot or Tory, was of the highest, but along the upper reaches of the Hudson, from Tivoli to Germantown, they were overshadowed by the Livingstons.
    Anna Hall’s grandmother, Elizabeth Livingston, the granddaughter of Chancellor Livingston, eloped with Edward H. Ludlow, a doctor. Imperious and strong-willed, she made her young husband give up his profession because she did not like a doctor’s hours. He went into real estate where values were booming and in the period after the Civil War became the city’s most respected realtor. That did not soften his wife’s disdain for those who carried on the world’s business. Once when some business associates came to see him at their house on fashionable Fourth Avenue, she stormed into the parlor, turned off the gas, and announced, “Gentlemen, my husband’s office is on lower Broadway.” They retired