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of an equally illustrious Houston clan. Rosimund and Lyman produced Lance and, eighteen years later, a surprise they named Arabella.
    Lance was the apple of his mother’s eye. For twelve years, until he went to boarding school, they were inseparable. Rosimund instilled in her son a sense of chivalry toward women, respect for his elders, social grace, and civic obligation. Her heart burst with pride as he grew into a young man who regularly made the dean’s list and the varsity team. Although he could have gone on to grad school, Lance chose to play football after becoming a first-round draft pick for the Dallas Cowboys. Rosimund wasn’t happy about the Dallas part, but she recognized that once Lance led his team to Super Bowl victory, he could easily become governor of Texas and from there president of the United States. She had a game plan and Lance subconsciously knew it.
    In most respects, Rosimund thought, Lance could not have chosen a better wife than Pippa Walker. She was his social equal, not some gold-digging tart. Pippa would produce gorgeous children. She was loyal to a fault: look at her devotion to Thayne. Rosimund only wished that Pippa had finished college and had some sort of career that she could give up for Lance. He was not terribly forthcoming about why she had not graduated from SMU. The rumor mill hinted that Pippa had followed some sort of Marxist auteur to Prague; Lance assured his mother that this sordid episode in his fiancee’s life was over and not as bad as she had been led to believe. He had even gone on to suggest that he, too, had had a few episodes in his life that Rosimund would not be thrilled to hear about. She had dropped the subject there and then.
    Upon reflection Rosimund had to admit that she had no problem with Pippa. It was Pippa’s mother who seriously threatened her peace of mind. Furthermore, no amount of money in the bank could erase the blot Dallas from the Walker pedigree. It was always, and would forever remain, downscale to Houston. Although the Walkers had struck oil a mere twenty years after the Hendersons, Rosimund considered Thayne nouveau riche. In fact, Rosimund had detected symptoms of lowerclassitis as soon as Lance had announced his engagement last Christmas. She had phoned a discreet inquiry to Dallas’s finest hotel, the Mansion on Turtle Creek, only to be informed that Thayne had booked the upper four floors of the hotel just an hour before! Rosimund had immediately summoned Lance to her chambers and asked if he
absolutely
wanted to go through with this marriage. Truth be told, he had proposed to Pippa not one month after the girl had returned in disgrace from Prague. For a moment Rosimund thought she saw a flash of terror in her son’s eyes. Then he had said, “Mother, it’s what I want more than anything in the world.”
    For the next six months Rosimund could only watch helplessly as Thayne created an extravaganza meant to delude people from Houston into thinking that people from Dallas were their equals. For Lance’s sake Rosimund maintained icily cordial relations with her co-grandmother-to-be. However, she missed no opportunity to discreetly obstruct or trump Thayne whenever possible.
    Like her idol Nancy Reagan, Rosimund wore nothing but red. She was also fond of astrology. After realizing with a shock that once Lance married Pippa he would be lost to her forever, Rosimund had sought the consolation of numerology. As luck would have it, not one week after her seer instructed her to avoid anything to do with the number ten, Thayne announced that there would be ten bridesmaids at the wedding. She hoped Rosimund would be able to produce ten groomsmen. Still smarting from the theft of all those hotel rooms, Rosimund had flatly refused. Her son would be attended by nine groomsmen and two pageboys. Little Arabella would be a flower girl. Thus war was declared.
    Six months later Rosimund still had no intention of attending