The Mansion

By Henry Van Dyke

This is a Christmas story. The mansion of the title is Weightman Mansion. It is not in the most fashionable area of town but it is evident that whoever owns it has money. It is a short story with a strong moral and uses the two main characters, Harold Weightman the son of Mr. Weightman, and the patriarch himself. They are used to point up the difference between what would now be called 'virtue signaling' and doing good with genuine and sincere intent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: Nov 22, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547425533

Henry Van Dyke

Henry Van Dyke (1928–2011) was born in Allegan, Michigan, and grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, where his parents were professors at Alabama State College. He served in the Army in occupied Germany, playing flute in the 427th Marching Band. There he abandoned his early ambition to become a concert pianist and began to write. In 1958, after attending the University of Michigan on the G.I. Bill and living in Ann Arbor, he moved to New York, where he spent the rest of his life. Henry taught creative writing part-time at Kent State University from 1969 until his retirement in 1993, and was the author of four novels, including Blood of Strawberries, a sequel to Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes.

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Henry Van Dyke

The Mansion

EAN 8596547425533

DigiCat, 2022

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Table of Contents

THE MANSION

BY

Henry van Dyke

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

ELIZABETH SHIPPEN GREEN

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON . M . C . M . X . I

The Mansion

[See page 57 "BUT HOW HAVE I FAILED SO WRETCHEDLY?"

[See page 57

BUT HOW HAVE I FAILED SO WRETCHEDLY?

Title Page

THE MANSION

Table of Contents

BY

Henry van Dyke

Table of Contents

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

Table of Contents

ELIZABETH SHIPPEN GREEN

Table of Contents

Illustration: Publisher Logo

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON . M . C . M . X . I

Table of Contents

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1911

Man with hands raised as if in prayer

The Mansion

Table of Contents

T

T

here

was an air of calm and reserved opulence about the Weightman mansion that spoke not of money squandered, but of wealth prudently applied. Standing on a corner of the Avenue no longer fashionable for residence, it looked upon the swelling tide of business with an expression of complacency and half-disdain.

[Pg2]

The house was not beautiful. There was nothing in its straight front of chocolate-colored stone, its heavy cornices, its broad, staring windows of plate glass, its carved and bronze-bedecked mahogany doors at the top of the wide stoop, to charm the eye or fascinate the imagination. But it was eminently respectable, and in its way imposing. It seemed to say that the glittering shops of the jewelers, the milliners, the confectioners, the florists, the picture-dealers, the furriers, the makers of rare and costly antiquities, retail traders in luxuries of life, were beneath the notice of a house that had its foundations in the high finance, and was built literally and figuratively in the shadow of St. Petronius' Church.

[Pg3]

At the same time there was something self-pleased and congratulatory in the way in which the mansion held its own amid the changing neighborhood. It almost seemed to be lifted up a little, among the tall buildings near at hand, as if it felt the rising value of the land on which it stood.

John Weightman was like the house into which he had built himself thirty years ago, and in which his ideals and ambitions were incrusted. He was a self-made