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Hetty said, “What do you charge?”

“Three hundred dollars,” the attendant said.

Hetty may have reached for a chair for support as the calculations whirled in her head: Three hundred dollars … how many months’ rent in Hoboken or Brooklyn? How many rides on the ferry? She considered for a moment. Then she lifted the skirt of her dress, reached into a pocket, and produced a wad of bills. She counted out six $50 bills and handed them to the surprised attendant.

“I’ll pay for this now,” she said.

Minutes later she was being whisked to a backroom, where she held her face before a steam bath as long as she could stand it, then sat still as thick layers of black mud were applied. The attendant advised her to relax her muscles and let all of her thoughts and cares drift away.

But there was another reason for Hetty’s sudden awakening to personal refinement—Sylvia, at last, had a beau whom Hetty considered worthy of her daughter’s hand in marriage. Hetty had been through a number of scares regarding Sylvia’s suitors over the previous several years. A procession of Europeans with impressive-sounding titles had come looking for a union that would exchange lineage to this or that royal house for cold American cash.

In early April of 1900, Sylvia had been briefly linked with one Francesco Serrano y Dominguez, otherwise known as the duke de la Torre. The duke had traveled from his native Spain in order to study American military methods. Annie Leary introduced Sylvia to the duke, and within six weeks rumors were spreading around town about a romance between the two, with open speculation that Sylvia was on her way to becoming a duchess. “The Duke is tall and distinguished looking,” the Times reported on its front page on March 19. “He speaks English badly.” Despite his lineage, the duke was said to get by on an income of about $4,000 per year—hardly enough to support an ambitious young man in a style befitting his title. The newspaper reported that the duke was planning a trip to Mexico, during which he would stop off in Texas and pay his respects to Ned, in advance of a June wedding.

Both Sylvia and the duke discreetly declined to answer any questions about their reported romance. Hetty, clearly annoyed with the whole idea, did not decline to comment. “This is the first I ever heard of such a thing. It’s just one of them lies they are always starting about me and my children,” she told a reporter who knocked on her door in Hoboken.

A year later, in the spring of 1901, Sylvia was linked romantically with one Charles Francis Seymour, earl of Yarmouth, who, despite that fancy title, was hungry and unemployed and seeking his fortune as an actor when he arrived in the United States in June 1899. The earl, who went by the stage name Eric Hope, had parlayed his title into introductions at Newport to the As-tors, the Vanderbilts, and other leading families—and it was at Newport that, again through Annie Leary, he met Sylvia.

The newspapers pegged the earl for a gold digger, and one day a particularly strident article appeared in the New York Telegraph, including the following line: “Speaking of Dukes and such things reminds one that the Earl of Yarmouth is in dire straits these days. The Earl is hard up.” The article also intimated that any young American heiress in search of a title might pick up the earl at a bargain rate.

The earl sued for $25,000, claiming that the article “caused great damage in his profession and brought this plaintiff into public scandal and ridicule in his said profession.” An unrepentant Telegraph responded that “it was generally understood in the United States of America that Earls and other English noblemen without means had been fortunate by reason of their titles in marrying rich American heiresses, and that by reason of the conduct of said Earl, it was the general belief that he was in search of an heiress.” The defendants added that the earl “then was and still is shopworn and damaged in reputation.”

Sylvia was subpoenaed by the defense, apparently