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quite young and had always treated her like a child. He alone decided the education, discipline, and religious training of his children. He did not even permit his womenfolk to go into the shops to choose their own clothes. He ordered dresses to be sent home where they were strewn around the parlor, and the women were allowed to make their choices. At Tivoli youthful spirits constantly rubbed against externally imposed standards. While the Roosevelts welcomed “joy of life” as the greatest of heaven’s gifts, the Halls considered pleasure of the senses to be sinful and playfulness an affront to God. As the Hall children grew up, their instincts were often at war with their moral precepts, and they had an especially strong sense of duty and responsibility.
    Anna Hall’s education, except for religion and manners, was sketchy. A great deal of attention was given to correct posture, dancing, and the social graces; one’s debut was more important than the cultivation of one’s mind except for a smattering of language, literature, and music. A scrapbook that Anna kept on a trip to England and Ireland the summer before she made her debut contained photographs of the accepted shrines of the culturally refined—Sir Walter Scott’s study, Abbotsford Abbey, Holyrood Palace, Windsor Castle. The poems that she transcribed into her exercise book were by the approved poets of the period—Longfellow, Browning, Owen Meredith—and she preferred those that pointed to a moral and suggested a rule of conduct.
    The same exercise book contained the beginning of a story she had written. Its language was conventional and its emotions stereotyped, its setting in a British castle suggesting the fascination that British titles had for girls in the 1880s—a form of escape both romantic and decorous. Its theme was the redemption of a dissolute London aristocrat by an equally aristocratic girl of nineteen. High-minded and self-controlled, Anna turned naturally to a man of ardor and bravura, even if he was weak.
    When Anna was seventeen her father died without leaving a will, which meant that the properties had to be administered by the court.Valentine Hall had never taught his wife how to budget and to keep accounts. Mary Hall, who knew nothing about disciplining her children since that had been her husband’s prerogative, was left with four daughters and two sons between the ages of three and seventeen. Anna, the oldest, was “the strongest character in the family, very religious”; she “took hold and tried to control the family.” But since she was also the most beautiful, she was married within three years of her father’s death.
    In the brief but strenuous New York season of 1881–82 Anna was acclaimed as one of society’s most glamorous women. “She was made for an atmosphere of approval,” a friend said, “for she was worthy of it. . . . Her sweet soul needed approbation.” Elliott’s courtship provided just that, for where she was reserved and circumspect, Elliott was demonstrative and ardent.
    It was the springtime of the year, the springtide of their love; their hope was high and their dreams radiant. Elliott introduced her to his Newsboys and she began to do volunteer work at the Orthopedic Hospital. Gallant messages arrived accompanied by flowers and proposals that they ride or dance or boat or dine together. On Sundays there were the church parades along tree-shaded Fifth Avenue past the fashionable residences, the young men top-hatted, the girls elegant, stopping to chat, while horses and carriages jogged northward toward Central Park.
    For the wealthy, the New York of the eighties was gracious and society a self-contained little island of brownstones that stretched from Washington Square to Central Park along Fifth and Madison Avenues, with a few Knickerbocker hold-outs at Gramercy Park and Stuyvesant Square—the “Second Avenue