The New York woman can hardly have a single desire that cannot be gratified through some bureau or agency of this town. Through them she can get a house, have it furnished, secure new wardrobe, a good form, a clear complexion, the latest shade of hair, and a loan to start the wheels of the concern in good running order. If she desires a husband, and a family warranted to have a marked resemblance, they can be had through the same channels at a nominal price. This husband-getting interested me. I did not want to marry but I was as curious as a little boy with a dynamite cartridge. I wanted to investigate. But how? A woman always hesitates about telling that she wants to marry. She would not confess to the lack of opportunity under any circumstances.
I saved the address of a Matrimonial Bureau which does business now in East Thirty-first street, and late one evening I called. I was ushered into a parlor and was soon talking to a man and woman who professed to introduce congenial spirits. He was a small, nervous man, with light brown hair and blue eyes. His wife was a black-eyed, black-haired, pleasant-looking little woman, with persuasive conversational abilities that her husband fully recognized. I told them I had heard of the agency and was anxious to partake of the bliss of making fires and sewing on buttons. I wanted to try through them to give some lonely man a chance to find his ideal. Knowing absolutely nothing of the running of the concern, I made inquiries very carefully.
“You find plenty of people anxious to marry, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes. We have between five and seven thousand names on our books of matrimonial candidates.”
“Not all in New York?”
“The majority live here, although our list covers the greater part of the United States. Who are the people? Well, we have one minister, several doctors and medical students, and all classes of business men down to the laborer. We have not the same variety among the women. They are mostly those who need a home or who are many days past a desirable marrying age. I should think that you would have plenty of proposals and would not need our assistance,” he concluded, flatteringly.
“One tires of meeting friends always in the way endorsed by society,” I answered, “and it seems possible that, by stepping aside from the ordinary way, I may meet some congenial one that I could never have known otherwise.”
He rubbed his hands, smiled and showed me the mammoth album containing photographs of gentlemen. (I was not permitted to see the women.) Such a collection! The Rogues’ Gallery is hardly more varied or interesting. By the side of a clerical-looking man, with quite hypocritical face, came an ancient Santa Clause, who looked as if, after all his years, he ought to know better. It was all very interesting, and I was longing to take the album away as a souvenir.
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The rest of the story you will be able to read in our upcoming book 'We won't be quiet' - the collection of nine stories written by our favorite “bad girls” of 19th and the early 20th-century literature.
