* The selected lines
were: "The Durmanovs’ favorite domain, however, was Raduga near the burg of that
name, beyond Estotiland proper, in the Atlantic panel of the continent between
elegant Kaluga, New Cheshire, U.S.A., and no less elegant Ladoga, Mayne, where
they had their town house and where their three children were born: a son, who
died young and famous, and a pair of difficult female twins. Dolly had inherited
her mother’s beauty and temper but also an older ancestral strain of whimsical,
and not seldom deplorable, taste, well reflected, for instance, in the names she
gave her daughters: Aqua and Marina (‘Why not Tofana?’ wondered the good and
sur-royally antlered general with a controlled belly laugh, followed by a small
closing cough of feigned detachment — he dreaded his wife’s
flares).
On April 23, 1869, in
drizzly and warm, gauzy and green Kaluga, Aqua, aged twenty-five and afflicted
with her usual vernal migraine, married Walter D. Veen, a Manhattan banker of
ancient Anglo-Irish ancestry who had long conducted, and was soon to resume
intermittently, a passionate affair with Marina. The latter, some time in 1871,
married her first lover’s first cousin, also Walter D. Veen, a quite as opulent,
but much duller, chap.
The ‘D’ in the name of
Aqua’s husband stood for Demon (a form of Demian or Dementius), and thus was he
called by his kin. In society he was generally known as Raven Veen or simply
Dark Walter to distinguish him from