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Grady was notorious for patronizing Albany’s slimiest whorehouses and saloons; Cleveland could not abide the man. It gave him pleasure to reject the Reilly appointment, and the political consequences be damned. That Cleveland refused to throw Tammany Hall such a piddling spoil of war spoke volumes: Under the Cleveland administration, Tammany could not even count on obtaining a lowly night watchman’s position for one of its own.

Observing all this downriver in Manhattan was Tammany’s boss, the cunning John Kelly, who was getting the message that Cleveland was no pushover. Kelly had become a wealthy man—although “no one quite knew how.” He was also Irish American royalty. When he had been elected to Congress in 1855, at the height of the Know Nothing movement, he was the only Catholic in the House of Representatives. After his wife died, he solidified his regal position in American Catholicism by taking for his bride the niece of John Cardinal McCloskey, who in 1875 had been chosen by Pope Pius IX to be the first American cardinal.

In October 1883, Cleveland shot yet another arrow at Tammany. In a letter he drafted to Kelly, he began by saying that he wanted to be “entirely frank,” then went on to demand that the disreputable Tom Grady be kicked off the ballot in the coming fall elections, just three weeks away. He showed the letter to Lamont, who disapproved. Why pick a fight with Tammany now? The presidential campaign was around the corner, and Cleveland would need Tammany’s cooperation.

“Well,” said Cleveland after considering what Lamont had to say, “I’m going to send it.” And he did.

Kelly held on to the letter for more than two weeks, while it seemed to beburning a metaphorical hole in his pocket. For him the issue was the Catholic working class versus the Protestant Anglo-Saxon establishment as represented by Cleveland. The governor, of course, never saw it as sectarian warfare, just straightforward good government. Kelly never responded to Cleveland’s letter, but he did leak it to his friends at the New York World.

Kelly had begun to hate Cleveland with a “sleepless vindictiveness.”

As a hard frost swept over New York State that winter of 1883, Frances Folsom had boys on her mind. The dorm room she shared with Katherine Willard was decorated with photographs of Frances’s beaus, and apparently there were several. Two proposals of marriage came her way during a single memorable visiting day in her sophomore year at Wells. She rejected one and said yes to the other, but after a few weeks made it clear to her new fiancé that it was not meant to be. Charles Townsend now had company.

“When I marry, it must be someone more than a year older than I am,” she wrote her mother, indicating that she was looking for maturity in a husband. The man she would marry, Frances said, had to be “someone I can look up to and respect.”

Contact with young men and communication with the outside world was strictly supervised at Wells College. The dean, known as the lady principal, was Helen Fairchild Smith. Not much got by Miss Smith, who maintained the list of “approved correspondents” for Wells students. The daughter of the president of Wesleyan College in Connecticut, at Wells, she also taught English literature. It was said that she ruled her students with a just and steady hand, and though the girls sometimes chaffed under her stern restrictions, they idolized her.

Ice-skating on the frozen surface of Cayuga Lake was a favorite winter sport at Wells, and sometimes an excursion with the good-looking cadets from the Cayuga Lake Military Academy would be arranged—but always under the eagle eye of Miss Smith or another chaperone she so designated.

At Wells everyone dressed for dinner, and formal eveningwear was required at all concerts and evening lectures. It was not acceptable for a student to show any leg, so proper attire, meaning a long dress, was expected, even to play bridge.

Frances was a leading lady on campus. With her authentic stage presence and lovely voice, she