The table came back then—not as twins—and we seated the dinner. It was to be in the court itself, the long table foursquare around the lily pool in the center, with a moonlight spot on the water.

“It will be pretty, I think. I do hope they like it,” she said, almost wistfully.

Personally I thought it might be a bit theatrical, but I did not say so. We worked hard, seating the thing. At five o’clock, tea came in and we took time out for it. She talked a little about herself, about her son Tony, whom she obviously adored and whom I had seen on and off for years without meeting him, about her widowhood, and even about John Wainwright.

“He was wonderfully good to me,” she said, and sighed.

I was liking her more and more. Evidently she had genuinely grieved for her husband, although my own recollection of him was of a tall bald man with a gray mustache, about as romantic as a toothbrush. She was so essentially simple, for all the grandeur around her. When we went back to work I felt I had known her for years.

Now and then she queried a card. I remember she did that about Lydia’s.

“This Mrs. Morgan,” she said. “Is she a widow?”

“More or less. Her husband ran away years ago with a girl from his office. It was a terrible scandal at the time. She divorced him, of course.”

“How sad. Has she any family?”

“She has a daughter,” I said. “She’s not out yet, but in a sense she’s been out since she was twelve. She’s a lovely thing. About eighteen. Her name is Audrey.”

“And you don’t like her?” she asked shrewdly.

“Not particularly. I’m too fond of her mother, I suppose.”

She let it drop then, and we went on with the dinner. At some time while we worked she asked me to make out a card for myself, and after that at least a part of my mind was busy wondering what to wear, and just how a social secretary behaved under such circumstances. At last, however, we had finished. She got up and stretched her fine body, and I remembered thinking that she looked like something out of a Wagnerian opera, big, full-breasted, and with that long, thick braid of golden hair, without a thread of gray in it.

“I’d like to show you the house,” she said. “You’ll have to know your way around, at least.” And she added, “I’m afraid it’s a little overwhelming. But my John got some fun out of it, so I haven’t changed it.”

Five minutes later, still in the house coat but with her braid primed like a coronet around her head, we began our tour of the Cloisters. Overwhelming was certainly the word. We wandered from Louis XIV to the Empire, from fabulous tapestries and paintings to what were certainly indifferent statues, from Savonnerie rugs to billiard and gun rooms, from the console of a pipe organ to a Chinese smoking room, and in one wing to an enormous ballroom with a high Byzantine ceiling, already opened and being aired for the impromptu dance. Much of it was used only on state occasions. In fact, later on I was to discover that Tony and Maud herself occupied only a half dozen or so rooms, although there were twenty-odd servants in the house.