Mrs. Sattyn-Whiley had had the upstairs butler show him the door, and he had been persona non grata ever since.

** Perceptive readers may be wondering why it is Colonel Whiley and Mrs. Sattyn-Whiley. This is because Mrs. Sattyn-Whiley had announced after the colonel had proposed to her, that she had no intention of permitting the Sattyn name, which went back all the way to the days of the Gold Rush of 1849 (Ezekiel Sattyn had owned 160 acres adjacent to Mr. Sutter), to die simply because her father's chromosomes had been the wrong kind to produce a son.

 

'Fifty thousand dollars a year!' she had commented. 'That's an awful lot of money for a singer, Edward.'

'Not for a singer like this one,' her husband had (for once) argued. 'She's been getting that much from the Metropolitan.'

'So what?' Mrs. Sattyn-Whiley had responded. 'What else do you know about her?'

'Her brother is the star of the Paris Opera,' the colonel had replied.

'I don't like the French and never have,' she'd said. 'All they think about is sex.'

'I don't think he's French,' the colonel had replied. 'Not with a name like that. Sounds more like Russian.'

'Perhaps,' Mrs. C. Edward Sattyn-Whiley had said, suddenly struck with an entirely pleasant notion, 'they are both exiled Russian nobility!'

'I don't mean to sound argumentative, darling,' the colonel had then said, quite unnecessarily, 'but I hardly think that's possible. She's only in her late thirties, and the Russian Revolution was over fifty years ago.'

'The children of impoverished noblemen!' Mrs. Sattyn-Whiley had cried. With that she'd picked up the telephone and called the San Francisco Public Library's Genealogical Collection. Within a matter of minutes, she'd been informed of the existence of the Grand Duke Sergei Korsky-Rimsakov, Lieutenant General of the Imperial Army, who was known to have fled to the West with his family in 1917.

'You see, Edward?' Mrs. Sattyn-Whiley had said. 'I have a feeling about things like this. How soon did you say the grand duchess can join us here in San Francisco ?'

If Mrs. C. Edward Sattyn-Whiley had been the sort of woman who could admit to having made a slight error of judgement, which she was not, she might have confessed to being somewhat disappointed in Madame Korsky-Rimsakov, at least personally. Not only did she not look like what Mrs. C. Edward Sattyn-Whiley thought a grand duchess should look like - she looked, actually, like the jolly and well-stuffed workers and peasants one sees in advertisements for travel in Russia - she also flatly refused to even discuss her family tree, other than to inform Mrs. Sattyn-Whiley that, so far as she knew, her only living relative was her brother Boris in Paris.

Worse, several years before, showing a shameful disregard for what Mrs. Sattyn-Whiley thought of as noblesse oblige, Madame Korsky-Rimsakov had married far beneath her. She had married, in fact, a man named J.