Mr. Van Arsdel, like many of our merchant princes, had come from a rural distinct, and an early experience of the hard and frugal life of a farm. Good sense, acute observation, an ability to take wide and clear views of men and things, and an incorruptible integrity, had been the means of his rise to his present elevation. He was a true American man in another respect, and that was his devotion to women. In America, where we have a clear democracy, women hold that influence over men that is exerted by the aristocracy in other countries. They are something to be looked up to, petted, and courted. The human mind seems to require something of this kind. The faith and fealty that the middle-class Englishman has toward his nobility is not all snobbery. It has something of poetry in it--it is his romance of life. Up in those airy regions where walk the nobility, he is at liberty to fancy some higher, finer types of manhood and womanhood than he sees in the ordinary ways of life, and he adores the unseen and unknown. The American life would become vulgar and common-place did not a chivalrous devotion to women come in to supply the place of recognized orders of nobility. The true democrat sees no superior in rank among men, but all women are by courtesy his superiors. Mr. Van Arsdel had married a beauty and a belle. When she chose him from among a crowd of suitors he could scarcely believe his own eyes or ears, or help marveling at the wondrous grace of the choice; and, as he told her so, Mrs. Van Arsdel believed him, and their subsequent life was arranged on that understanding. The Van Arsdel house was an empire where women ruled, though as the queen was a pretty, motherly woman, her reign was easy and flowery. Mr. Van Arsdel delighted in the combinations of business for its own sake. It was his form of mental activity. He liked the effort, the strife, the care, the labor, the success of winning; but when money was once won he cared not a copper for all those forms of luxury and show, for the pride, pomp, and circumstance of fashion, which were all in all to his wife. In his secret heart he considered the greater part of the proceedings in and about his splendid establishment as a rather expensive species of humbug; but then it was what the women wanted and desired, and he took it all quietly and without comment. I felt somewhat nervous when I asked a private interview with him in Ida's library. "I have told mamma, Harry," whispered Eva, "and she is beginning to get over it." Mrs. Van Arsdel received me with an air of patient endurance, as if I had been the toothache or any of the other inevitable inflictions of life, Miss Alice was distant and reserved, and only Ida was cordial. I found Mr. Van Arsdel dry, cold, and wary, not in the least encouraging any sentimental effusion, and therefore I proceeded to speak to him with as matter-of-fact directness as if the treaty related to a bag of wool.