“She has taught all fashionable New York that to dream you see a poet is a sign you will lose money. It is supposed that this will widen the gap between Bohemia and McAllisterville. A girl who was going abroad for the London season, dreamed a Duke was in love with her and very much cast down on learning; that she would be apt to marry a needy and shiftless fellow.” — “Thanks to the meteoric increase in millionaires in New York due to the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution, many of whose fortunes rivaled or even surpassed the oldest of families, Mrs. Astor and Ward McAllister had a whole new challenge in deciding who of the nouveau riche was acceptable. This led to the creation of the famous List of 400 — the Four Hundred people who were New York’s high society.” —from MCNY.org
— Photo of old postcard from the Etiquipedia photo library
Fortunes in Tea Cups
A “Fortune Teller to the 400”
It wouldn’t be a bad sign, and really there is a woman who might also lay claim to the distinction, for in the revolutions of fads and fashions in their orbits, that which is oldest comes round again. Of course, not a one of them would own to being superstitious but to put on one's “swagger” spring suit and pay a swagger price for a visit to a dark-eyed woman with a red turban marked with Egyptian characters about her head lends a wild flavor of interest to an afternoon. The woman is clever, for she really keeps an owl. It's a great mistake for a sorceress to grudge little additions like that to her paraphernalia. She wears broad heavy bracelets on her wrists and wraps something red about her shoulders. Otherwise her environment is prosaic, and, she being for a moment in luck, quite un-mysteriously and inartistically comfortable.
She has taught all fashionable New York that to dream you see a poet is a sign you will lose money. It is supposed that this will widen the gap between Bohemia and Mc Allisterville. A girl who was going abroad for the London season, dreamed a Duke was in love with her and very much cast down on learning; that she would be apt to marry a needy and shiftless fellow. We all dread nowadays to dream of stockings, unless the are cotton ones, or of broken parasols. The dream we long for is of pots of jelly, or long life and good fortune, or of picking violets, for happiness in love.— San Francisco Call, 1890
Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia © Etiquette Encyclopedia
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