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commissioned by the royal family.
    Mr. Stuart, who was seventy-one, turned out to be William Whitewright Stuart, a graduate of Princeton and the son of a New York banker. He was a member of the Barcelona stock exchange butdidn’t consider himself a businessman. He described himself as a painter and a mountaineer. When Dorothy’s father said they didn’t want to take up too much of his time, he assured them his only engagements for the day were his piano and reciting lessons. He liked to preside over salons and dinners to which he invited artists and dancers and the nobility of various countries. Often he entertained his guests by playing the piano and singing operettas in Spanish and Italian; one night he recited from Hamlet. “It was a very weird experience,” Dorothy concluded, but it made the sodden trip to Spain worth taking.
    Then their year of travel, highbrow culture, and unlikely encounters was over. They were twenty-three years old and going home.

8

    D EPARTURE
    Postcard of South Street in Auburn, New York, early 1900s
    S oon after Dorothy and Ros returned from Europe, the appeals of bridge parties and automobiling began to wane, and in 1911 they went to stay in New York City for several months. They saw it as another adventure; their parents hoped that through connections in the city, they would encounter some men who might meet with their approval. At the Webster, a small hotel off Fifth Avenue on West Forty-fifth Street, they rented a suite with a sitting room, a large double bedroom, and a bath, for which their parents paid six dollars a day. Ros, who acquired admirers everywhere she went, was pursued by Charlie Hickocks, a lawyer for a shipping company. He had his own brownstone and frequently took her out, with Dorothy going along “as baggage.” Although they were polite to him, privately they made fun of his odd looks and affectations, with Dorothy taking the lead. He had an unusually long neck topped by a very long, thin face. “We thought he was a regular ‘Miss Nancy,’ ” she said. “He had his linen allembroidered with his initials and that kind of thing. Needless to say, Rosamond wasn’t interested in him.”
    Back at home, they entertained guests at South and Fort streets, visited friends in other cities, and dallied with young men. For a few years Ros strung along another New Yorker, a lawyer named Billy, who expected to marry her, and whom she apparently saw as her default option if no one more exciting presented himself. The other men who pursued them were mostly studying at the Auburn Theological Seminary, which trained Presbyterian ministers. One of the most prestigious divinity schools in the country, it was headed by Allen Macy Dulles—the father of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Allen Dulles was a friend of Dorothy’s parents, who considered the seminary a good source of suitors. Although her sister Carrie-Belle had married one of the seminarians several years earlier, Dorothy was scornful of the type. She wrote to Anna from Cortina about a guest in the hotel: “There is a queer looking youth with long, black greasy hair—and he looked just like the worst of the seminary students.”
    In their spare time, influenced by two generations of Auburn feminists and by their time at Smith, Dorothy and Ros supported Jane Addams’s Hull House and advocated women’s suffrage. They became members of the Cayuga County Political Equality Club, and in good weather, they stood on soapboxes in Owasco. In 1914 they organized a meeting at Suffrage Headquarters in the Woman’s Union. Dorothy introduced the speaker, Mrs. Theodore M. Pomeroy of Buffalo, who talked about her work as a national officer of the club and explained why she was a suffragist. Mrs. Pomeroy described canvassing house-to-house and running meetings all over the city, so that women would be ready when their time came to vote. Thousands of women were attending, she said, immigrants included. In the future, “a mother