Then, as time went on and brought with it an increase of prosperity, she hungered, as a millionaire's wife, for that mystic urban El Dorado of the affluent American, New York. Though he felt that he was sacrificing a few hundred thousand by the migration, Alfred Spaulding finally came East and built a handsome home for himself and his wife on West Seventy-second Street. It was all very dreary and very lonely for them both during their first two years in this new home. But little by little Alfred Spaulding drifted back to that world of business and strenuous effort which constituted life for him. And day by day Mrs. Spaulding hovered more and more closely about that high-walled garden where worldly wealth flowered into sensuous affluence, though as the mere wife of an unknown millionaire she seldom alighted on the borders of society, which to the end she insisted in describing as "The Four Hundred." But if she could not dine and dance and drive with them, she still had left to her the compensating pleasures of dining and dancing and driving in their wake. She could still reserve their tables at the cafés on off evenings, and their boxes at the theaters when they were elsewhere. There was nothing to prevent their milliners from making hats for her own aspiring head, and she could still buy her jewelry and her flowers in the same shops with them, and even drive bewilderingly near them in the Park. Then came the advent of Cordelia Vaughan. The young authoress from Kentucky was just at the zenith of her fame; The Silver Poppy had, as Mr. Henry Slater described it, "set the Hudson on fire"; her new-found friends were still reprovingly demanding why she held back her second volume, and publishers, it was said, were besieging her for manuscripts. The public press, too, was hinting from time to time that the new Kentucky beauty was laboring on a mysterious volume that was to shake society to its very foundations. Then it was whispered about that she wrote only from memory, that she was living the romance which later should appear in type. Photographers sent to her, begging for a sitting. Niccia, the sculptor, made a little bust of her, and declared she had the only Greek nose in America, and there was a poem or two indited to her "sad, sad crown of golden hair," as one melancholy versifier had put it.