The ‘chance’ meeting with Delphine Spooner was carefully orchestrated, the following Thursday lunchtime, at Taylor’s. Ida had visited Mrs Spooner at her substantial brownstone house on Second Avenue, and over boudoir biscuits and Lapsang Souchong, the two of them had arranged that Delphine and her mother should go shopping and promenading on Broadway, and should arrive on the corner of Franklin Street, where Taylor’s Restaurant stood, at the stroke of midday, and that Mrs Spooner should suggest they go inside for an ice. Coincidentally, of course, Collis would already be there with Ida, and over their light lunchtime refreshment, the two could be introduced.

Collis detested the idea. He would much rather have simply left his card at the Spooners’s house and then paid Delphine a visit. But Ida adored intrigue, particularly an intrigue which made everybody uncomfortable except herself, and she insisted on ‘a fateful encounter of two like hearts’.

‘I don’t know why the devil I’m doing this,’ Collis told his mother, as they waited in the drawing-room for Steadman to bring around their carriage. ‘I feel as if I were ten years old.’

‘You’re doing it to please me,’ said Ida. She was dressed in a coffee-coloured gown with a lace-trimmed bodice, and she held her off-white shawl around herself as tightly as if she were sitting in a draught. Her bonnet was overloaded with ribbons and ostrich plumes, and her face was powdered quite white. ‘You do very little to please me, as much as I deserve it, but now you can exert yourself, if only slightly, to see that I am happy.’

‘Mother,’ said Collis, ‘I’m not sure that happiness becomes you.’

Ida clucked, and stretched her neck disdainfully. If Collis was going to be impertinent and unappreciative, then she would rather not listen. She had to admit, though, that she was moderately pleased by his agreement to meet Delphine, and she had tried to see him in a less critical light over the past few days. He was a very fine-looking boy, after all; and in his cream-coloured suit with maroon braiding around the edges, and his cream-coloured silk hat, he was a handsome prize for any girl.

She was only sorry that this was the last week that she and the Spooners were to remain in New York, before retreating for the rest of the summer. It would mean that, once introduced, Collis and Delphine would have to postpone the continuation of their planned romance until the fall. Still, that would give them time to moon and mope over each other, and in Ida’s view the best romances were full of a good deal of mooning and moping.

She didn’t even consider for a moment, now that Collis had agreed to look Delphine over, that the ‘young lovers’ might despise each other on sight.