She was born in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, at Nice, in France, and she spent the early years of her life in St. Louis, a somewhat conservative old city on the banks of the Mississippi River. Her father was Randolph Leffingwell, and he died in the early flower of his manhood, while filling with a grace that many remember the post of United States Consul at Nice. As a linguist he was a phenomenon, and his photograph in the tortoise shell frame proves indubitably, to anyone acquainted with the fashions of 1870, that he was a master of that subtlest of all arts, dress. He had gentle blood in his veins, which came from Virginia through Kentucky in a coach and six, and he was the equal in appearance and manners of any duke who lingered beside classic seas. Honora has often pictured to herself a gay villa set high above the curving shore, the amethyst depths shading into emerald, laced with milk white foam, the vivid colours of the town, the gay costumes; the excursions, the dinner parties presided over by the immaculate young consul in three languages, and the guests chosen from the haute noblesse of Europe.
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