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history, a combination that seemed natural and pleasing. I took up my duties with excitement, knowing I had no choice, yet eager to make the most of the opportunity. In my heart, I believed Macaulay would be only a way station.
    I surprised myself by choosing a city merely twenty miles from my nightmare of Niagara, but Buffalo was considered a place of promise and hope. Already it was called the Queen City of the Lakes, the greatest inland port in the history of America. And it was a city of glamour. Buffalo had sent two presidents to the White House, Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland. When I came to the city in 1886, Cleveland was in his first term in the White House. He had recently married young, beautiful Frances Folsom, who had grown up in Buffalo. She was wildly popular, with fan clubs dedicated to her around the country. There were sixty millionaires in Buffalo and scores who were almost millionaires. Their fortunes came from Great Lakes shipping, from railroads, flour milling, lumber, leather tanning, meatpacking, soap, iron, wallpaper, banking—and, quite simply, land: from the fervent rush of commercial interests to establish a foothold in Buffalo. The city’s daughters were being sent abroad to marry into the English aristocracy.
    Outwardly, I prospered as the city prospered. In 1892, I became headmistress after only six years at the school. I brought Macaulay to prominence and doubled the enrollment, to close to two hundred fifty girls in grades 1 through 12. I instituted a college preparatory curriculum and, most important, made it fashionable. Girls from good families who had once completed their educations at finishing schools out of town now stayed home and graduated from Macaulay. Granted, not more than a handful were permitted to go to college, but all Macaulay girls attained a breadth of knowledge which made me proud. In addition to the standard subjects (including Latin), the girls studied chemistry, physics, and trigonometry. Many undertook the study of classical Greek. The curriculum was difficult, and new for women, but my girls rose to the challenge. I began a scholarship program, and although I had only limited funds (enough for one or two students per year), nevertheless Macaulay was recognized for educating the most talented among the working class. As an added benefit, my girls, probably for the first time in their lives, were forced to interact on an equal basis with the daughters of the men employed by their fathers’ factories. I also formalized a program of volunteer work, to give my scions of power and wealth an awareness of the bleaker realities of their city. I wanted them to take this awareness into their marriages, each a gentle but persistent infiltrator.
    Through all of this I never gave up my own goal, to undertake studies in Europe for an advanced degree in geology. My daily life in Buffalo felt transient, like a youthful, albeit fulfilling, lark. Yet as the years passed, almost in spite of myself I became settled. When the day came that I finally possessed the financial means to leave the city to pursue my own dreams, I no longer felt I could. I had invested too much, in emotion and labor, to leave the city behind. My moment of choice had passed.

    Grace Sinclair lived in a Palladian house set back from the corner of Lincoln Parkway and Forest Avenue, less than a half-mile from Macaulay. A low brick wall surrounded the estate, with trees and shrubbery further shielding the house from the street.
    The evening after Millicent Talbert’s visit, I stood at the gate, my gloved hands upon the frigid grillwork, and I studied the house. A light, feathery snow was falling. Months had passed since I last stood here, and the house looked indefinably different. It glowed behind the barren trees with a brightness which wasn’t entirely welcoming.
    Grace Sinclair was my goddaughter. When her mother, Margaret, had died seven months ago, she’d left her husband, Tom, devastated. Margaret had