Almost all the comfort, rather. Josie Mansfield provides the rest.

She hadn’t expected to move to Jersey City; she was getting to like New York. But she supposes she’ll survive, if the exile isn’t permanent.

She has learned to adapt, having no alternative. Her mother, who named her Helen Josephine, took her from Boston, where she was born, to gold rush San Francisco. Her father disappeared early, replaced, as a male figure, by a stepfather and then a husband. Of the stepfather she speaks as little as possible, apparently trying to remember as little as possible. Her husband, Frank Lawlor, was an actor whose finest role, in the judgment of the fifteen-year-old Josie, was rescuing a damsel in distress, namely her. The marriage got her out of California but didn’t do much for her emotionally or otherwise, and she and Lawlor agreed to part. She returned to Boston, found little to sustain her there, and moved to Philadelphia. She liked Philadelphia but heard fascinating stories of New York, ninety miles up the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Civil War was over; business in the great city was booming, and men with money needed women with charm.

Josie doesn’t lack charm, although precisely what it consists of, in her case, sometimes eludes description. She isn’t classically beautiful; her nose is too long, her jaw too square. But her brown hair flows in waves and her heavy-lidded blue eyes exert an irresistible attraction on male eyes, even pulling them away from her voluptuous form.

She is familiar, from Frank Lawlor, with the theater; she knows that it affords opportunity for attractive but impecunious young women. To the New York theater she goes. She calls herself an actress, a category comprising all manner of strivers, from prostitutes to mistresses to honest-to-goodness stage players. Josie lands midspectrum, although she aspires to the more respectable end of the scale.

In her aspiration she finds Jim Fisk. She occasionally visits the Thirty-fourth Street establishment of Annie Wood, a former actress and current madam, and in November 1867 notices Fisk, of the jeweled fingers and the fancy clothes. She whispers to Annie that she’d like an introduction, and Annie obliges.

Josie can tell at once that Fisk is smitten. She can always tell such things. She lets him admire her. Their eyes meet; Fisk can’t take his away.

She confesses to him that she knows almost no one in this strange city. When he responds as sympathetically as she supposes he will, she apologizes for her plain and well-worn dress, saying it is the best she can afford. When he inquires where she lives, she says in a modest rooming house but that she might not be staying there long. Why? he asks. Because the rent is due and she is short, she replies. Within the hour he becomes her protector and provider, and she his fond friend.

Within the week he decides that she requires better lodgings. He finds her a room in a more respectable boardinghouse. He visits her there and the friendship blossoms. He buys her dresses and diamonds. He eventually purchases her a house, a stylish brownstone on Twenty-third Street not far from his own house.

He drops over during the day and most evenings. He brings friends, and she entertains them. He and the friends talk business; she listens. She asks him questions about his speculations; hearing his answers, she praises his cleverness. She inquires, hesitantly, whether she might participate in some of his safer endeavors. He delightedly consents. She laughs with pleasure and bestows kisses and other signs of affection when her investments succeed.

She knows of Mrs. Fisk, and that she lives in Boston, but she and Fisk don’t speak of her. When Fisk travels to Boston she accepts his explanation that it is for business, just as she accepts the presents he brings her when he returns.

She sometimes visits him at the office. She can tell that the visits annoy Dan Drew and Jay Gould, who obviously disapprove of her and her relationship with their partner. But she knows that Fisk likes to show her off. And anyway, a girl of twenty-two has to get out now and then.

She is surprised when he informs her, in March 1868, that he will be staying in Jersey City for a while. She has been observing the struggle with Vanderbilt, but she hasn’t imagined it would come to this. When he invites her to join him at Taylor’s Hotel and says it will be like a vacation, she considers her options and decides to stand by her man. For now.