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the Singer sewing-machine fortune, fell instantly in love with her, and her second illegitimate baby was born in May 1910.
    Dorothy thought Duncan’s performance was one of the loveliest things she had ever seen. She wrote to Milly, “The stage was absolutely bare—hung in soft brown draperies—and she was accompanied by a very fine orchestra. . . . She just simply floated around the stage, which was so simple that it looked like ordinary walking.” She thought, as others did, that Duncan “looked like the Winged Victory come to life—or a figure off a Greek coin—she danced entirely in bare feet, and it seemed perfectly natural, and quite different from the way the Russians did it. I never saw such an ovation . . . and such flowers!”
    Before they left Paris in January 1911, Dorothy and Ros splurged, setting themselves up with suits, everyday dresses, and several evening gowns each—which, they told each other, would be perfect for Auburn’s formal events. This time Dorothy did not consult with her mother. One of her gowns was a closely fitted sleeveless blue satin with a very low neck and a long train; she had satin slippers dyed to match. Rosamond ordered a black velvet suit with a white fox collar and muff. “Oh, she was so beautiful in it,” Dorothy told her grandchildren. “I felt I couldn’t afford that, but I certainly enjoyed seeing her in it.”
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    In their final month in Europe, they made the long-anticipated trip to Cannes to stay with Dorothy’s rich relation, Josephine Beardsley Brown. Her parents already had arrived, and her father met them atthe station. “I can tell you,” Dorothy wrote to Carrie-Belle, “the sight of Papa was the best thing I have seen abroad.”
    Cousin Josephine, a lively, fun-loving cousin of Mrs. Woodruff, had grown up at Roselawn, an Italianate mansion on South Street in Auburn that backed onto Fort Hill Cemetery. When she was a baby, she was dropped by her nurse, which left her lame, and she walked with a cane. Josephine’s father, William Beardsley, Dorothy said, had been “a perfect dragon,” and he ruled his three daughters “with a rod of iron.” Although he put out the word in Auburn that, upon marriage, each of them would be given a Victorian house, he disinherited Josephine’s older sister Cora when she married someone he considered unworthy. Josephine didn’t marry until her father died. She was forty-nine.
    William Beardsley would have been even more enraged by Josephine’s choice: Clement Brown was a tall, impressive-looking man with a Vandyke—but a mere clergyman, over a decade younger than she was, and “so poor,” according to Dorothy, “that he lived in a boarding house where he had to stuff one of his windows with an old cloth.”
    Josephine and Clement showed Dorothy and Ros around their home, which they had bought only four months earlier. The main house was a palatial, half-timbered Queen Anne , flanked by sentries of towering palms. Off the Avenue du roi Albert, Villa Les Lotus had been built in 1883 by the duchess Albine de Persigny, wife of Louis Napoléon—ambassador to the court of Saint James. Josephine, in a tribute to her father’s legacy, called her new home Roselawn. “It seemed like a dream,” Dorothy wrote, to walk through the two-story entry hall, past the library and the billiard room with high, coffered ceilings, and to enter one of the grand salons and “find Mother and all the others—and a great crackling fire.”
    When she woke up the next morning, she looked out the window at the aquamarine Mediterranean glinting in the sun. The view from the breakfast room was even better, and she was torn between gazing at the sea and at “the all-absorbing choice of jams.” The duchess hadbeen an amateur botanist , and her plans for the gardens were influenced by a recent trip to Japan. She came back to Cannes with statuary and Japanese maples, along with various rare arboreal specimens. She also