Lowell’s school and could behave like a lady when she wanted. Despite Aunt Sylvias misgivings, Hetty had picked up a thing or two at Mrs. Daughters Sarah and Sylvia instructed Hetty on New York society and introduced her to their friends.
Theirs was a lively house of six children (three more had died young). A worldly man and an adventurer at heart, Grinnell financed several Arctic expeditions and served as the first president of the American Geographical Society. Born in 1799, Grinnell had left New Bedford for New York as a young man, joined a mercantile business started by his brother, and established himself as one of the city’s most prominent merchants. New Bedford’s prosperity was well known throughout the country, and the wealthy of New Bedford found access into the upper circles of New York business and society. When she was about twenty, perhaps at Sylvia’s urging, Hetty spent a month in New York as the guest of Henry Grinnell, her mother’s cousin. Aunt Sylvia, in particular, fretted over Hetty’s lack of preoccupation with feminine things, and worried that, even by the modest standards of Quaker dress, she stood out as unfashionable. Her favorite place was still with her father in the counting house or on the docks, and at times she used waterfront language that shocked genteel souls. She was tall and full-figured, with large blue eyes, a long, straight nose, prominent chin, and generous brown hair.
For a figure who would one day garner the title “Witch of Wall Street,” Hetty was a particularly lovely young woman.
0 kommentar(er)
