The Wheeling Daily Register

A Fifth Avenue Story-Divorced from the Mother but Married to the Daughter

Husbands and wives are not necessarily unfaithful to one another because they take houses on Fifth avenue. Nevertheless, circumstances are constantly occurring which seem to prove that a residence on Fifth avenue promotes an abnormal development in morals. For instance. in one of the cosiest and most exquisite of the many little palaces that adorn that famous thoroughfare.. occurred the other day a domestic emeute, in which a mother, a daughter and a step-father are concerned. The mother is a faded beauty, but makes up remarkably well. At night her rouge twinkles hide her wrinkles. and bismuth paste effaces the cruel crow's-feet. She is as sharp as a steel trap, and one of the smartest savers of naughty things out. She has a daughter, a slim brunette, who looks as her mother might have looked twenty years ago, and frills her conversation with scraps from the French phrase books. Some months ago, the widowed mother married a foreigner, a broker in Broadway. who has since broken her heart. The marriage consummated, all went merry as a marriage bell, which is proverbially supposed to vibrate in a condition of perpetual merriment. Mother, daughter and step-father lived together in virtuous joy, in spite of the tradition that two's company and three's a crowd. The affection of step-father and step-daughter for one another was a phenomenon beautiful to behold. It was a "thing to see, not to hear." It was. in fact, like the loves of Byron's Parisina and the luckless Hugo, with the sexes reversed, and the consequence is that the outraged mother and wife succeeded in getting a divorce, and the daughter and husband are living together, and are received by society as man and wife. All this is nothing, though. As long as les agrements are preserved, society is doubtless right in not being too particular. Society's conduct on such occasions is always charming. It is the soft Cedilla that always removes the harshness from the hard sounding moral C's of social life. The strangest thing is that the wife and mother's heart being broken, she patched it up again, goes to dinner parties at her daughter's and divorced husband's and receives them at dinner parties in return. Think of it! What delicious complaisance ! What knowledge of the world! What a perfect abandonment to les graces, les convenances of life! Think of that old woman, rouged up to the eyebrows, sitting vis-a-vis to her divorced husband and her daughter-his wife-and whispering banter and blandishments to the young men she attracts to her side, and who are ingenuous enough to color at the jokes of a woman old enough to be their mother.