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He has a wife who is forty-five years old and passes for “about thirty.” They have a son who has been out of college four years, and after learning enough of business to supervise a fortune, has settled down to the life of a “gentleman”; a daughter, who came out last winter and who is being guarded by her mother, her companion, her aunt and her sophisticated self against the wiles of fortune-hunters wearing Cupid’s livery; a son who was at Groton, is now a sophomore at Harvard; a daughter nine years old.
They have three fixed and six or seven temporary residences.
First, there is the palace in Fifth avenue, where the family is united for a few weeks in each year. It is closed from the first of June until the first of October, and when the various members of the family make flying trips into New York they take a suite at the St. Regis or at Sherry’s. Second, there is “the cottage” at Newport, about the same size as the palace on Fifth avenue. Most of the family usually spend the latter part of the summer here. Third, there is the large new house on Long Island, twenty-five miles from New York, where several members of the family spend part of the spring and fall. Luxurious New Yorkers are becoming more and more susceptible to the changes of the season. They are emulating, though as yet at a distance, the smart set of Juvenal’s Rome, with its summer and winter finger rings.