Almost twenty years had passed since the Vanderbilts built their mighty mansions on Fifth, in the Fifties. Since then, people had been building further north. Palaces in all kinds of styles, designed by architects like Carrère & Hastings, Richard Morris Hunt, and Kimball & Thompson, had arisen in the Sixties and Seventies, on Madison and Fifth. French chateaux, Renaissance palaces, the greatest styles from the architectural menu of Old Europe were being splendidly plundered and copied so that their owners could gaze over Central Park like the merchant princes they were.

The Masters couldn’t afford a palace like that. They could live near one, though. But should they?

J. P. Morgan didn’t live up there. Pierpont Morgan’s mansion was on the east side of Madison, down at Thirty-sixth Street. Mr. Morgan had openly stated his opinion that some of the mansions going up on Fifth were vulgar monstrosities. And one couldn’t deny that he had a point. Most of those mansions were being built by new money. Very new money indeed. Morgan’s great fortune might only derive from his father Junius, but it had come from banking in London, in the grandest manner. The Morgans, besides, had been well-to-do in Connecticut since the seventeenth century. Compared to all but the oldest Dutch families, they were old money.

And that was the point.

Rose was always grateful to her father-in-law for the names he had chosen for his son. The fact that it had come about by chance, that for some reason Tom’s wife had taken a fancy to the name of Vernon and that Tom had disliked it and suggested the old family name of Vandyck instead, didn’t matter. What mattered was that Rose could, quite properly, call herself Mrs. William Vandyck Master—and in doing so, proclaim that her husband came not only from Anglo-Saxon Protestant money, but from Dutch ancestors who went all the way back to the days of Stuyvesant and before.

The Masters were only modestly rich, but their money was old. As long as a family could afford to stay in society, that counted for something.

So this was the delicate balance she needed to think about this afternoon. How close could she—should she—live to those ostentatious palaces which, secretly, her heart desired? Or how far should she maintain a staid and distant attitude? If she could play her cards right, she would achieve the perfect result: the new princes would invite her to their palaces, and wonder if she’d come.