Empire

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“THE WAR ENDED last night, Caroline. Help me with these flowers.” Elizabeth Cameron stood in the open French window, holding a large blue-and-white china vase filled with roses, somewhat showily past their prime. Caroline helped her hostess carry the heavy vase into the long cool dim drawing room.

At forty, Mrs. Cameron was, to Caroline’s youthful eye, very old indeed; nevertheless, she was easily the handsomest of America’s great ladies and certainly the most serenely efficient, able to arrange a platoon of flower vases before breakfast with the same ease and briskness that her uncle, General Sherman, had devastated Georgia.

“One must always be up at dawn in August.” Mrs. Cameron sounded to Caroline rather like Julius Caesar, reporting home. “Servants-like flowers-tend to wilt. We shall be thirty-seven for lunch. Do you intend to marry Del?”

“I don’t think I shall ever marry anyone.” Caroline frowned with pleasure at Mrs. Cameron’s directness. Although Caroline thought of herself as American, she had actually lived most of her life in Paris and so had had little contact with women like Elizabeth Sherman Cameron, the perfect modern American lady-thus, earth’s latest, highest product, as Henry James had not too ironically proclaimed. When Del asked Caroline to join the house-party at Surrenden Dering, deep in the English countryside, she had not even pretended to give the matter thought. She had come straight on from Paris, with a single night at Brown’s Hotel in London. That was Friday, and the United States and Spain had been at war for three exciting months. Now, apparently, the war was over. She tried to recall the date. Was it August 12 or August 13, 1898?

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