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cousinage depended on her to extract permission for whatever outing or other project that, without her, might be subject to family veto.
    In the first year after our coming-out, Lily's interest vested exclusively in the young men who called at our houses on afternoons when our parents received and among whom it was expected we should ultimately find a spouse. Needless to say, Lily's temperament led her to entertain highly romantic ideals, and she had little patience with the concept of an "arranged match." She also had little patience with my mild preference for Winthrop, or "Wintie," Tillinghast, who was the most assiduous of my not madly assiduous beaux.
    "He's too old and too stuffy, Aggie," she insisted. "He's like Osric in
Hamlet.
He genuflected to his mother's dug before he sucked it."
    Lily was not only well read; she was very free with her literary allusions. But she had a point. Wintie was certainly older; he was thirty plus to my nineteen and already established as a junior officer in the bank that handled the Thorn trusts. He was tall and perhaps too dignified, with a regular, rather immobile countenance and prematurely gray hair, but he had a surprising sense of humor and a kindly manner. He knew everybody, was well liked and a popular leader of cotillions. The Tillinghasts were not rich but were well connected, and his two elder brothers had married substantial fortunes. I classified him as the kind of man who, even if he had to marry money, would marry only a rich girl he sincerely loved. That was a distinction that most of my female cousins learned to make early. I was very fond of Wintie and tended to resent Lily's aspersions, but she did alter my vision of him.
    We used sometimes to take afternoon callers next door to see Grandpa's great picture gallery, and once, when Wintie and I found ourselves alone there, we had a colloquy that irritated me.
    Of course, the paintings that Grandpa so lovingly collected are all—or almost all; some of his canvases by Corot and Millais are still admired—subject to public ridicule today. They tended to be academic and what was then considered realistic: Meissonier's Napoleonic battles gleaming with brandished swords and rustling with charging horse; elegant Roman dames by Alma-Tadema gazing down at blue seas from marble balustrades; stout cardinals drinking champagne in paneled parlors by Vibert. I quite accepted the high estimate of the gallery by family and friends and took it for granted that although Leonardo and Michelangelo may have produced greater art, it was because it was locked away in museums that it had not been lured across the Atlantic by Grandpa's checkbook.
    Wintie took his stand for several minutes before a picture by Géróme entitled
Thumbs Down,
depicting a scene in the Roman arena where a victorious gladiator, astride the stricken body of his antagonist, appeals to the audience for that which will bid him to dispatch or spare his victim. The Vestal Virgins, seated in a unit by the railing, are unanimous for death, while in the imperial box above them, Marcus Aurelius, conspicuously indifferent to the outcome, is seen giving his total attention to the perusal of some learned scroll.
    "It's a wonderful painting!" Wintie exclaimed. "You can see so clearly the attitude of the imperial philosopher. He will never neglect his official duties, one of which is to lend his presence to the popular diversions of his people. On the other hand he is disgusted by the bloody spectacle and sees no reason to lose time from the learned studies that enhance his administrative talents."
    "But why can't he at least save that poor man's life?" I demanded.
    "Because he believes he shouldn't interfere.
Panem et circenses
—that's what kept the people happy. Without them, there was no telling what civil unrest might occur. The man who had the whole civilized world to govern couldn't be concerned with the life of one gladiator."
    "Civilized! I'm glad you call it