Patty developed the strictest standards for Immy and was amazed at the girl’s indifference to her mother’s standards. All of Patty’s quondam audacities in dress and deportment were remembered as conformities to strict convention. Immy’s audacities were regarded as downright indecencies. Immy, for her part, was outraged at the slightest hint of youthfulness in her mother. With her own shoulders gleaming and her young breast brimming at the full beaker of her dress, Immy would rebuke her mother for wearing what they called a “half-high.” Both powdered and painted and were mutually horrified. Immy used the perilous liquid rouge and Patty the cochineal leaves, and each thought the other unpardonable—and what was worse, discoverable. Breathless with her own wild gallopades in the polka and dizzy from waltzing in the desperate clench of some young rake, Immy would glare at her mother for twirling about the room with a gouty old judge holding her elbow-tips; or for laughing too loudly at a joke that her mother should never have understood. Finally, Patty had recourse to authority and told her husband that the city was too wicked for the child. She—even Patty—who had once bidden New York good-by with tears, denounced it now in terms borrowed from Dr. Chirnside’s tirades. Immy was mutinous and sullen. She refused to leave and threatened to run off with any one of a half dozen beaux, none of whom her parents could endure. This deadlock was ended by aid from a dreadful quarter. By a strange repetition of events, the cholera, which had driven Patty into RoBards’ arms and into the country with him—the cholera which had never been seen again and for whose destruction the Croton Water party had taken full glory—the cholera came again. It began in the pus-pocket of the Points and drained them with death; then swept the town. Once more there was a northward hegira. Once more the schoolhouses were hospitals and a thousand poor sufferers died in black agony on the benches where children had conned their Webster’s spelling books. Five thousand lives the cholera took before it went its mysterious way. Coming of a little bolder generation, Immy was not so panic-stricken as her mother had been. But since all her friends deserted the town, she saw no reason for tarrying. The country was not so dull as she had feared. The air was spicy with romance; fauns danced in the glades and sat on the stone fences to pipe their unspeakable tunes; nymphs laughed in the brooks, and dryads commended the trees. The railroads made it easy for young bucks to run out on a train farther in an hour or two than they could have ridden in a day in the good old horseback times. A fashion for building handsome country places was encouraged by the cholera scare. White Plains began to grow in elegance and Robbin’s Mills changed its homely name to Kensico, after an old Indian chief.