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introduction for Francis. So for the summer of 1927 he was a sort of an honored aide representing the powerful and brilliant Clarence Dillon throughout European banking circles, starting in Berlin with the Diskont Gesellschaft. In Paris that year Francis received a cable from Dillon saying, “I’m taking a few friends on a Mediterranean trip. WI’ll you join us in Gibraltar?” There I was working away at a little branch bank in Boston, while Francis seemed already well on his way to becoming an international tycoon.
    LILY MAYNARD  The cruise ship was called the
Baltic.
I was about nineteen or twenty, and my family thought I was up to no good in New York. I was idle, like most of my generation. And they didn’t like the young man I was seeing. I was to be chaperoned on the trip by Mrs. Rogers Winthrop, who had her eighteen-year-old daughter, Alice, along with her. Also on the trip were Charles Dana Gibson, the celebrated illustrator, and his wife, who was the original Gibson Girl. I remember the older ladies on the trip saying to Mr. Dillon about Francis: “Let’s see the Adonis.”
    I had a bit of a flirt with Francis—a modest, chaste kiss in the moonlight. He was a very handsome man, quite vain, a rather faddish person who drank two glasses of milk a day—a kind of a health maniac. He was enormously clean; he smelt good.
    Mr. Dillon had expected to like Francis, but I had a feeling that he did not take to him. He was being tried out as an assistant, a courier, a private secretary; he would get tickets, pick up baggage.
    After the trip I saw Francis in Paris and then in Cambridge. He was very intense with his emotions. He fantasized quite a bit. I think hewas a man who saw himself in pictures of his imagination and dreams. He got rather intense about marriage. I found him a very attractive beau . . . a very pleasant Cicerone . . . but I was not prepared to get married. I told him in Cambridge it was all over, and he looked sad punting on the Cam River.
    MINTURN SEDGWICK  Soon after the cruise Francis went to London to work in the investment banking firm of Lazard Frères. Again he played and worked very hard until one morning he suddenly collapsed to the floor. We knew nothing about it until about two or three weeks later, when a cable arrived from Francis saying: “The reason I haven’t written was they thought I was going to die, and there was no sense in telling you that. But what they thought was a heart attack was a nervous breakdown.” Of course, that was the end as far as his financial possibilities with the Dillon empire were concerned.
    After he’d been in a nursing home in England, his doctor said: Is there some pleasant place near here where you can stay quietly for a month before going home?” Francis remembered a close friend and classmate from Groton, Charles de Forest, whose father had taken a summer place called Tilney, a manor house in the English countryside. The de Forests said they would be glad to have him. So he went, and that’s where he met Charlie’s younger sister, Alice.

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    SAUCIE SEDGWICK  My parents actually met for the first time years earlier, when my father was at the Cate School. My mother had gone out to Santa Barbara on a trip with her parents, and my uncle Charlie de Forest had suggested they look up my father. My father was about sixteen years old and very handsome, my mother was twelve. When my mother saw him, she fell in love with him then and there for life. She had to wait about eight years. My grandmother told me that my mother knew what she wanted and no one could talk her out of it.
    My mother grew up on Long Island on an enormous place called Nethermuir, which had been in the family since 1866. It was a hundred and fifty acres of wild laurel, woods, and lawns that went to the edge of the water, with a view of Long Island Sound. My grandfather Henry de Forest was an amateur landscape gardener, and I remember as a child walking around the grounds with him. He