Miss Talcott

Miss Talcott is a young vibrant and wealthy woman, born into the upper class of New York City. She is living a carefree lifestyle amongst the high society and is a regular guest at the Gildermere balls.

She is described by Woburn as a young and naive little girl unable to understand the complexity of the human moral spectrum. She is part of a society in which morality is founded on social conventions. In such society, it is poverty which becomes the unpardonable sin - “not the violation of the human heart”¹

According to Woburn, that simple and childish mind of Miss Talcott is the result of her upbringing. “[...] it was to the cheerful materialism of their parents that the young girls he admired”² are unable to understand for instance the complexity of the moral spectrum.

However, those girls, including Miss Talcott cannot be held responsible for their way of understanding the world. Again, Woburn holds the parents responsible for raising their daughters in a shallow way, equipping them with a plain and infantile mind, leaving them helpless and unable to do simple tasks such as putting out a smoking lamp. Miss Talcott's helplessness and dependency on others amuse Woburn.

Still, dazzled by her shiny and glamorous world, Woburn is charmed by Miss Talcott's vibrant opinions even though, according to him, they have no connection to reality. In Woburn's eyes “[…] her ideas had the brilliant bloom and audacious irrelevance of those tropical orchids which strike root in air.”³ Despite the fact that her ideas seem brilliant, they could never be planted into a soil in which they could grow and bloom into something relevant.

In addition, the following paragraph helps to understand why Woburn is still infatuated by Miss Talcott.

“Her supreme charm was the simplicity that comes of taking it for granted that people are born with carriages and country places: it never occurred to her that such congenital attributes could be matter for self-consciousness, and she had none of the nouveau riche prudery which classes poverty with the nude in art and is not sure how to behave in the presence of either.”⁴

To put the matter another way, Miss Talcott is not aware of the issue that other people do not have the privileges of her financial advantages, which implies she never feels superior to the lower classes or even frownes upon them. She never looks down on them. She is not an arrogant or snobby woman.

However, later in the story, when Woburn's perspective starts to shift, he begins to reflect on Miss Talcott's behavior. It is not quite clear to him if she would put on a facade from time to time. At one point she is dancing with Collerton, a political lawyer and in all probability the new one in line for marrying her, when Woburn has an insight about his doubts about the purity of her mind: “He [Collerton] must have made a lot in that last deal; probably she would marry him. How much did she know about the transaction? She was a shrewd girl and her father was in Wall Street. […] If he (Woburn) had confessed his sin to her [...], she would have said that really it was of no use to tell her, for she never could understand about business”⁵ Besides, the fact that she smiled at Collerton the same way she had smiled at Woburn before, adds also a little bitterness to her character and raises the question why she - living in a society where everyone is putting up a facade in order to play by the conventional rules - should be immune to all that?