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in confusion.
    Eleanor remembered her great-grandmother as a very old lady whom she, her Aunt Maude, and Grandma visited regularly on Sundays. One Sunday Grandma Hall was ill and Eleanor and Maude went alone. The old lady refused to accept their explanation for Mrs. Hall’s absence and told them to go right back and summon “Molly,” which they did. Mrs. Hall dutifully got out of bed. When one of Eleanor’s cousins, who was also the old lady’s granddaughter, inherited some blue Canton china, she asked her father why so many pieces were missing. “Well, my mother used to throw the plates at my father and myself and so a good many of them were broken,” he explained. When Mrs. Ludlow wanted something or felt irate, she banged the floor with her cane, which Eleanor remembered as a very long one. “I was terrified of her,” Eleanor later said, adding half in amusement, half in admiration, “she was char acter .”
    A picture of this iron-willed lady shows a plain but strong mouth, and if the upper half of her face is covered, the mouth and chin are those of Eleanor Roosevelt.
    She and Edward Ludlow had two children—Edward, “the gentlest of men,” and Mary, who was mild, submissive, and beautiful. Both married children of Valentine G. Hall.
    The senior Valentine Hall was an Irish immigrant. He settled in Brooklyn and by the time he was twenty-one had become a partner inone of the largest commercial houses in the city and had married his partner’s daughter. The firm—Tonnele and Hall—enjoyed “unlimited credit” throughout the world. “He had remarkable business ability,” his contemporaries said, and before he was fifty retired from business “with a large fortune” that included considerable real estate from Fourteenth to Eighteenth Streets along Sixth Avenue. He lived another thirty-five years but contributed little to civic welfare except for his support of religious enterprises.
    His son, Valentine G. Hall, Jr., was a gentleman of solemn dignity who, after some sowing of wild oats and a period of penitence that included attending a theological school, assumed his place in society and executed its obligations and those of his church with punctilious regard. He did not go into business but lived the life of a leisured gentleman. He fathered six children—four daughters and two sons, Valentine and Edward; the Ludlows said he was good for little else. That was not his opinion of himself. In 1872 instead of building a larger town house, he built Oak Terrace at Tivoli, next to the house of his brother-in-law. * Its finest room was the library, presided over by a bust of Homer. There, together with a resident clergyman whom he supported, he pursued his interests in the classics and in theological doctrine.
    Valentine Jr.’s preoccupation with theology gave a puritanical tone to Tivoli life that was unusual for the Hudson River gentry. He was troubled by man’s innate depravity. “I awoke this morning about half-past seven,” he wrote in his journal when he was twenty-seven. “Instead of getting up immediately as I should have done, I gave way to one of my many weaknesses and lay instead until the clock struck eight building castles in the air. Oh! how much time, precious time, we waste in worldly thoughts.” His austere ways reminded a neighbor of “one of the olden Christians,” and the family clergyman later wrotethat “no one could ever forget the morning and evening devotions, the Sunday afternoon recitation of favorite hymns.”
    In the Roosevelt household religion was seen as the affirmation of love, charity, and compassion; in the Hall household at Tivoli it was felt that only a ramrodlike self-denial was acceptable to God. Religion was also used to justify domestic tyranny. Valentine Hall, Jr., was a despot who had little intellectual respect for his wife. He had married her when she was