Part 17

Not yet in middle life, and with two sons to be launched upon their careers, in which she has already foreshadowed what her part may be, the world may still expect to hear much of her, for there is a bracing and vigorous quality in her individuality that renders her interesting and inspiring to many classes and many countries. She has been frequently reproduced in the fiction of her era, more than one English writer drawing his material continually from her life and character.

To what extent her beauty forms part of her magnetism is with many people a debatable question. Though Long painted her as a typical beauty, and Sargent's canvas of her that hangs in her own library portrays an exquisite feminine loveliness, she leans perhaps too much towards the masculine in mental poise and temperament to be an adequate reflection of purely feminine beauty. A many-sided, strong, self-sustained character, her outward form is an expression of her own uncommon personality rather than a type of conventional beauty.

NELLIE HAZELTINE

(MRS. FREDERICK W. PARAMORE)

Among the members of the graduating class at Mary Institute, St. Louis, in the year 1873, was a young girl who, in addition to the bright mind and intellectual ambition she had already manifested, was endowed with so extraordinary a physical beauty and so lovable a character that much of the brilliancy of her life might even then have been foretold. She was not yet seventeen years old, and was as absolutely unconscious of the unusual loveliness of her person as she ever seemed to be even after ten years of adulation.

Her figure had already attained a faultless contour, and in her simple graduation gown of white French muslin, the flounces of its skirt headed with wreaths of pink roses and green leaves, and its round bodice offset with a bertha covered in the same design of roses and leaves, she suggested all the fragrance and beauty of a flower. Her red-gold hair seemed to reflect some of the sun's own glory, and with the marvellous delicacy of her skin, the deep wine-color of her eyes, and the classic perfection of her features, there can be little doubt that she was, as she was so often said to be later, the most beautiful woman ever born west of the Mississippi.

Among her school-mates Nellie Hazeltine had won that popularity that was hers in after years to so remarkable an extent among all women. The power she possessed of diffusing herself and all that pertained to her among others precluded every thought of envy, and those with whom she came in contact experienced rather a sense of personal gratification in the contemplation of her gifts than any desire to despoil her of them or of the admiration they attracted.

She was the only daughter of Captain William B. Hazeltine, a man who had made a large fortune in the mercantile world, and she went from school to further enhance the attractiveness of an already beautiful home. There for several years she continued her studies, though it was not unusual then for girls of her age to take up their position in the social world immediately upon quitting school. As a result her accomplishments were of a higher order than those commonly possessed by the young women of her period. She was well read, she spoke French with the same ease with which she spoke her mother tongue, and was a musician of unusual ability. Such attributes soon gained for her a wide reputation and a unique position in the society of her native city.

[Illustration: Nellie Hazeltine

(Mrs. Frederick W. Paramore)

From photograph by J. C. Strauss]

In the matter of its social complexion St. Louis has generally been classed among the cities of the South. Besides the French, who formed a large proportion of its early settlers, those who rose early to a leading position were the families who had migrated there from Virginia and Kentucky. They were slave-owners and landholders, and as such gave a substantial character to the social foundations of the city. The Anglo-Saxon gradually absorbed the French element, which, though it disappeared from the political horizon, still formed a powerful undercurrent in the lives of the people, harmonizing the forms of their social intercourse and imparting a certain artistic value to their existence generally, that gave St. Louis a distinctive place among the growing and wealthy young cities in its vicinity. This, with the character it took from the dominant race, which restrained it from that tendency to display that was elsewhere more or less apparent, yet which ever inculcated the sacred laws of hospitality, blended into a delightful whole and gave to the city a charm that it has never lost.

Of such a civilization Nellie Hazeltine has unquestionably been the fairest product. Yet no one was less conscious than she of the eminence of her position or of the sensation her appearance invariably created.

Shortly after the beginning of her social career she went with her father to Washington to attend a competitive drill of military organizations from all sections of the country. While there she was selected to present the colors to the company of which her father was captain. Among the spectators of a scene which is always more or less inspiring, was a man who, though already past middle-life, was yet not proof against the witchery of such a singularly lovely presence as Nellie Hazeltine's. From the moment she thus crossed his life, like many another man of less prominence, Samuel J. Tilden followed her career with an ardent and chivalrous admiration that increased as her beautiful character developed and disclosed itself.

When he came before the country as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency, and captured not only the nomination but the majority vote of the people, when his name was on every tongue in America, and everything that concerned him was of absorbing interest, the story of his devotion to Nellie Hazeltine spread throughout the length and breadth of the country.

From the moment it became known that Samuel J. Tilden had been elected President of the United States, till Samuel J. Randall, Speaker of the House of Representatives, cutting the tie vote of that body, redeemed its pledge to abide by the decision of the Electoral Commission, which declared Rutherford B. Hayes President of the United States, forms one of the most thrilling periods in our political history. It was but eleven years after the great civil struggle, and people living to-day, when the sinews of the nation are again knitted, cannot easily estimate the bitterness engendered by the campaign that fell during our centennial year.

The contest reached nothing less than a sublime climax when Randall, with nothing in his great form or his strong face to betray the struggle it had cost him, stepped quietly down from the Speaker's platform, and, taking his place on the floor of the House, uttered amid its breathless silence that affirmative syllable upon which hung national tranquillity.

Both men took the oath of office,--Tilden, the people's choice, in the privacy of his own home in New York, and Hayes, twice, first, on Saturday afternoon, the 3d of March, in the White House, overlapping Grant's term of office by a few hours, that there might be no intermission occasioned by inauguration-day falling on Sunday; and again on Monday, the 5th of March, in the presence of the people.

A Presidential campaign that proceeds and terminates in the usual way is sufficient to entail an enormous amount of publicity upon the candidates. The campaign of '76, however, gave Tilden both a prominence and a place in the affections of the people of his country that could scarcely have been greater had he been permitted to fill the high office to which they elected him.

His bachelorhood was an interesting feature of his personality, for we had had at that time but one bachelor President. The sentimental side of public opinion was satisfied, however, with the report that he was soon to be married to Miss Hazeltine. On her part, though his admiration for her was easily apparent, she never referred to his having offered himself to her any more than she revealed the fact of any other man ever having honored her with a similar proposal. Yet it was known through men who could not easily disguise the sharpness of their disappointment at her rejection of their suit that she was continually the recipient of such offers.

Though she was already well known socially, in both St. Louis and New York, her fame was established after the summers of 1876 and 1877 on a vastly wider basis. During the latter season she made a tour of the Eastern watering-places, and went for the first time to the Greenbrier White Sulphur Springs, succeeding Mattie Ould in its social leadership during the last days of the old _régime_, when it occupied the first rank as a distinctively Southern resort.

There was no one who made any pretence of rivalling her, though fair women from every section of the South still upheld the fame of the old resort. She has been frequently compared to Mattie Ould, and the history of their short lives furnishes several points of similarity. Hers was a more faultless type of beauty than Mattie Ould's, however, and she had a reserve and dignity that were in keeping with its high order, whereas, Mattie Ould was distinguished by a flow of spirits and a brilliancy of wit that captivated every fancy and carried all before it. Both had the power to attract and hold the attention and admiration of large circles of people, one by the overwhelming sparkle of her words, the other by the magic of a lovely presence.

Nellie Hazeltine was at all times as charming in the society of her own sex as she was among men; and women in every rank of life had for her a tender attachment. Many a girl trying her uncertain young social wings for the first time owed to her that subsequent enjoyment and happiness which is called success. She was absolutely unselfish, and without display used the remarkable power which her own fascinating personality gave her to add to the happiness or improve the condition of others.

On the 2d of December, 1881, she was married to Mr. Frederick W. Paramore, a young railroad man of St. Louis, and a son of Mr. J. W. Paramore, who was president of the Texas and St. Louis Railroad.

Memories of her, like those of Mattie Ould, centre in the days of a glorious girlhood. She was but twenty-seven years of age when she passed out of life, a little more than two years after her marriage, followed by an infant son whose existence had measured but a few days. The entire city of St. Louis mourned her loss, and few people have been laid to rest amid such evidences of a profound and universal grief as followed her. Her grave in Bellefontaine, whither strangers visiting St. Louis still frequently make a pilgrimage, was literally filled in with flowers by the young women of the city, to whom her life had been a beautiful example.

In the Museum of St. Louis, there hangs a portrait of her painted by Carl Gutherz. It is a full-length figure dressed in white and standing in her own drawing-room. Her abundant hair is arranged after the peculiar fashion of the day, with a heavy fringe low on the forehead. From beneath it, however, there looks down upon the beholder a face reflecting something of both the heart and mind whence flowed the charm of Nellie Hazeltine's personality, and of a beauty so ideal as to be almost sufficient in itself to immortalize her among the women of her country.

MARY VICTORIA LEITER

(BARONESS CURZON OF KEDLESTON)

For the second time within the century an American woman has risen to viceregal honors. Mary Caton, the granddaughter of Charles Carroll of Carrollton and the widow of Robert Patterson, of Baltimore, through her marriage, in 1825, to the Marquis of Wellesley, who was at the time Viceroy of Ireland, went to reign a queen in the country whence her ancestors, more than a century before, had emigrated to America. In Mary Victoria Leiter, whose life, to the people of a future generation, will read much like romance, we again behold an American woman, who, like the Marchioness of Wellesley at the time she became Vicereine of Ireland, is still young and beautiful, filling a similar position in India, with its four hundred millions of subjects.

The parallel between her life and that of Mary Caton, however, goes no farther. Wellesley was already in possession of the Governor-Generalship of Ireland when he married Mrs. Patterson. He was, moreover, beyond the threescore mark in years, and he bore "his blushing honors thick upon him," having already been Viceroy of India. Curzon was but thirty-nine years old when the governor-generalship of the latter mighty country, the shining mark of many a man's whole career, was offered to him. His public life bore little more than "the tender leaves of hope," though his writings on Eastern topics were already accepted as highly authoritative. Lady Wellesley had but to follow the leadership of a man of recognized ability and established fame, while Lady Curzon walks side by side with the man who is making that steep ascent which the British editorial mind has classified as "Salisbury's most interesting experiment." It is, moreover, an open secret that, far from shrinking from the new office, with the weight of responsibility which it imposed, she encouraged her husband to accept it.

While we are familiar with that phase of international marriage which confers rank and title upon the daughters of our republic, no American woman has ever played such a part in the British empire as has fallen to the lot of Lady Curzon. From that day in the spring of 1895, when she became the wife of the young Commoner, George Nathaniel Curzon, she stepped into English history; the days of her American belleship became a fragrant reminiscence. The qualities which had given them brilliancy, however, continued to illuminate the broader horizon of her life in England, and have become in her present exalted position the admiration of her own country, whose interest in her is purely personal, and the gratification of England, whose interest is political and much farther-reaching.

To the vast majority of people, who have but a superficial knowledge of Lady Curzon, her charm lies in the phases of that exterior life which are visible to all and easily discerned from afar,--her youth, her beauty, her wealth, the artistic perfection of her raiment, and the glory and pageant of her present existence. These, however, are but foot-lights to the real power of the woman rising beyond them.

As a girl in America she stood forth against the rich background of her home as distinctly as she is silhouetted to-day against the magnificence of the throne of India. It was not so much what she did or said, though that was sometimes of an unusual order, that made her the social power she was in America; it was rather what people instinctively felt that she was. "What thou art," says Emerson, defining that force we call character, "so roars and thunders above thy head, I cannot hear thee speak." She was serious and earnest rather than scintillating, with a reserve and dignity of manner tempered by a sweetness that admitted no suggestion of austerity.

The grace with which she now meets every situation, the intelligent interest she manifests in every theme with which she is approached, are not matters of happy chance or accident. She has been carefully equipped for her place in life. Studious and ambitious, she has known little of frivolity or idleness. Every faculty and every gift with which she was endowed have been conscientiously cultivated, so that, like the wise virgins of the parable, she was found ready when the hour came with a light that guides not only her own footsteps, but is seen from afar.

[Illustration: Jennie Chamberlain

(Lady Naylor-Leyland)

From the painting by H. Schmiechen]

Though Lady Curzon's life has been largely cosmopolitan, the city of Chicago, in which she was born and passed her first thirteen years, has a more substantial claim upon her than any in which she has since lived. She evidently reciprocates the feeling of the former city, for it was to it that she recently addressed a plea in behalf of the famine-stricken districts of India. It was there that her father, Mr. Levi Z. Leiter, amassed his immense fortune, laying its foundation as a partner in the dry-goods firm of Marshall Field & Co. There, also, her brother, Joseph Leiter, still continues his remarkable position in the stock market.

In the year 1881 Lady Curzon's family joined that ever-increasing colony at Washington that is made up of wealth and leisure. It has in recent years become a distinctive feature of the capital, its members having built there some of the handsome homes that adorn the city, and which they occupy usually for a few months each year. Their social functions are attended with much magnificence, and they have the _entrée_ to official society, and frequently to that exclusive circle of aristocratic old families, many of whom have lived there in unostentatious elegance ever since the nation transferred its capital to the banks of the Potomac.

For a time Mary Leiter attended the school in Washington founded some years ago by Madam Burr and subsequently conducted by her daughters. She was a good student. Quiet in her manner, she emitted only occasionally that sparkle of wit or fun that so often flashes from the happy school girl of fourteen. She exercised, however, a fascination to which both her teachers and companions were susceptible. Her beauty of face, her pose and carriage, together with a sweet, girlish modesty and a graciousness that was simple and unaffected, rendered her at all times most attractive.

The greater part of Miss Leiter's education, however, was conducted at home, under governesses, and her individual tastes and talents thus developed. Travel, and a more or less prolonged residence abroad at various times under most happy circumstances, cultivated her powers of observation and developed in her that breadth of mental vision that at an unusually early period not only removed the crudities of youth, but gave her that poise and finish that made her so charming to men and women of mature and brilliant intellect.

Comparatively little was heard of her family socially till after her _début_, which occurred in the winter of 1888, and their present social prominence in the United States is due to the remarkable impression she everywhere created. As a new-comer she was viewed critically, for she aimed always at the highest and best in the social castes of her country. She was weighed in the balance with the daughters of better known and longer established families of the East, and was found their equal in beauty and breeding and frequently their peer in charm of manner and intellect.

In Washington her father leased the home, on Dupont Circle, of the late James G. Blaine, and there Miss Leiter spent the first years of her young womanhood, during which such homage was paid her that she never entered a drawing-room nor crossed a ball-room without attracting the attention and gaze of every one. She planned and directed the numerous social functions given there by her parents on a scale of magnificence that was not easily approached, and she brought to the house a fame such as it never derived from the occupancy of its distinguished owner nor any of his family.

When her father built his own home, which is considered by many people the most beautiful in Washington, her taste found a new field for its display, both in the plan of its construction and in its final decorations. It was minutely described in the press of the country,

## particular emphasis being given to the apartments appropriated to Miss

Leiter's use, so undoubtedly was she the social genius of her family and the figure who held the interest of the public.

A few years ago the favorable verdict of a man whom a recent historian of New York society has designated its self-appointed dictator went far towards establishing a woman's reputation for beauty or distinction on a national footing. Mr. Ward McAllister undoubtedly wielded a singular power and influence, and his unqualified admiration of Miss Leiter, while it reflects to-day much credit upon his judgment, played at the time a considerable part in the wide spread of her fame.

Her development was rapid and continuous, and she rose in the course of a few years to a national prominence. It has been said of her that she was not true to early friendships. "The law of nature is alteration forevermore," and every mind that expands must outgrow the objects that satisfied it at one period of its existence unless they are capable in a degree of keeping pace with its progress. As a matter of fact, while there was a graciousness in her manner towards all with whom she came in contact, she formed but few close friendships, the natural reserve of her temperament rendering it impossible for her to respond easily to those intimacies which enter into the lives of so many girls.

During the second administration of President Cleveland there existed between his young wife and Miss Leiter a degree of friendship that was as flattering to one as it was to the other, for the Clevelands enjoyed the reputation of choosing their friends for their personal charm.

During both of his terms of office Mr. Cleveland had a home in the suburbs of Washington, where he and his family passed much time between seasons, and where they frequently entertained the friends whom they admitted more or less to their intimacy. There, during the spring of the year in which she was married, Miss Leiter passed every Sunday prior to that event, carrying away with her to another land a vivid impression of one of the most admirable women who ever adorned public life in America.

England was by no means an unknown country to Miss Leiter. She had been accustomed from her early childhood to spending much time in Europe, and a London season, which is the climax of many an American girl's social ambition, was not a new experience to her. The season of 1894, however, marked a turning-point in her life. Hon. Thomas F. Bayard, who was our Ambassador at the Court of St. James at the time, had been married not long before to Miss May Clymer, of Washington, a daughter of Dr. Clymer, of the navy, and a granddaughter of Admiral Shubrick. The Bayards had known Miss Leiter at home, and they undoubtedly contributed much to the reception she everywhere met during that season in England, for they themselves were much sought after, and the distinction of their position gave prominence to her. They brought her into contact with a class of men and women among whom her own highly endowed mind found an inspiration on whose wings she rose in a short time to a new fame.

Among those who paid her the tribute of a profound admiration was a rising young secretary of the kingdom, a man of scholarly tastes and an author of established reputation.