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“I can not expect to accept your kind invitation on account of sickness. Mother and Aunt’s regards,” she wrote.
    Along with the city’s most proper youth, Hetty took classes at Lorenzo Papanti’s Dance Studio, where the thin, glossy-wigged count, wearing patent-leather pumps, taught them how to move and how to comport themselves. Under his wary eye, the students stifled a giggle now and then and learned to dance. “Point your toe, Miss Robinson!” Papanti might call out, and if Miss Robinson did not point her toe properly, the fiery teacher would rap her foot with his fiddle bow. “Back straight, Mr. Cabot!” he might say to another, and if the student did not draw himself up with his back erect, Papanti would drum the bow on his spine.
    Not only were the students taught to dance, they learned how to conduct themselves at parties and balls. The rules were strict: a gentleman must bow when asking a lady to dance; he must not ask the same girl to dance twice; he should not take a seat next to a young lady he did not know; if he walked someone home after a ball, he must not enter her house, but should call on her the following day.
    As for the ladies, they must remember not to hold hands or fraternize with favored men; must not refuse to dance with any gentleman; must not dance more than once with the same partner. The worst, as one woman complained, was the rule for moving about the room: “A woman, old or young, may not stir from her seat to get supper, or avoid a draught, or change places for a better view, without being annexed to the arm of some member of the selecting sex for whom she must wait or whistle.”
    Hetty polished her etiquette, pointed her toes, and stiffened her spine. Dressed in her best frock, dancing shoes, and long white gloves, she held her partner lightly as they stepped across the ballroom floor in a polka, a waltz, or a quadrille. Over the months the studio’s big mirrors reflected her progress from a stomping adolescent to a graceful young woman.
    It showed when the effulgent New Bedford debutante first appeared in public in 1854. With a wreath of flowers in her curly hair, a black velvet ribbon around her neck, and filigreed gold balls dancing at her ears, she held her hooped petticoats and curtsied in a white muslin dress. Her twinkling eyes and rosy complexion, robust figure and quick retorts dazzled the eligible young men.
    Hetty did little to encourage them. When a starry-eyed suitor came to the family hardware store where she sometimes worked, he cast an eager glance as she lifted her skirts to climb the stairs, hoping for a glimpse of her graceful ankles. But the stars in his eyes nearly turned to tears when he beheld the sight of her ragged stockings hanging about her calves.
    She may have been unmoved by the smitten young man, but the choice of husbands was slim in New Bedford and their bank accounts were even slimmer, compared to those of Hetty’s family. No daughter of Edward Robinson and no niece of Sylvia Howland would marry beneath herself. Her mother’s cousin Henry Grinnell, Joseph’s brother, had moved with his wife to a bigger city where the chances of meeting the right man were far greater. Arrangements were made, and with a deposit of $1,200 placed in a special bank account, her father took her down to the waterfront and wished her well. Giving her orders to embellish her wardrobe, he waved goodbye as she climbed aboard an overnight steamer and set off alone for New York.

Chapter 3

A City of Riches

    R ich, hemmed thick all around with sail ships and steamships … crowded streets, high growths of iron … the houses of business of the ship-merchants and the money-brokers … the carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses.… City of hurried and sparkling waters! City of spires and masts! City nested in bays! My city!”
    Hetty awoke in the morning toWalt Whitman’s beloved city, “Mannahatta”: a hustling, bustling whirlwind of carts,