THE NEW YORKER

A great generation passed with the death of Ella Wendel, last of a truly New York family. In Ella a long line of men and women concentrated all their traditional reverence and single-minded passion for property in a vain attempt to perpetuate their ideals in an alien world.

The six Wendel sisters waxed and waned under the tyrannous rule of a brother whose whole life was bounded by the limits of his New York real estate, gathered under the ancestral maxim "buy but never sell". Once sister Georgiana gave vent to all the suppressed inhibitions so common, as the psychologists have pointed out, to middle aged victorians, and fied to the chaste red plush of the old Park Avenue Hotel. Her insubordination was dearly bought, however, for she was proved mentally unbalanced and passed the remainder of her days in a gloomy asylum for the insane. Ella conformed, and as just reward for her restraint, became the moribund companion to a succession of poodles who in their mistress likeness have been haughtily flirting with death.

No longer can the seasoned ballyhoo man in the passing charabane jerk a grimed finger at the old house, and in condescending monotone comment on Noo Yawk's mystery house, home of Ella Wendel, richest unmarried dame the country's got. The public has laughed for the last time at the dying Wendels; for Ella's nearest of kin is Tobey, the poodle.