Describing that moment many years later, Blanche would strike a particularly portentous note: “On that day, how could I have guessed that Fate had already begun to spin her web? How casual that first meeting! Weighted—unknown to me—with such a significance! But the sun had shone and the wind was sweet, and lighthearted happiness was abroad that day. And now, even as it had been earlier at McKay’s estate at Newport, the sea and all its allure was the background.”1
Perceiving the spark of attraction that had instantly flashed between “Mollie” and the charming Miss Chesebrough, Morgan excused himself to attend to his other guests. No sooner had he gone than Roland led Blanche “to a couple of deck chairs in a snug corner, sheltered from the sun and wind.” There, they “drank champagne and laughed over the most inconsequential things.” Blanche could not fail to be captivated by the handsome and cultivated young man:
He was clever and witty and amusing…. He had charm, grace of manner, and a bearing that was aristocratic. Normally rather fair, he was now tanned by exposure to wind and sun. He was debonair, and his poise and air were those of the cosmopolite. He possessed a decided gift for repartee, and about him there was a gay insouciance, an ease, a smiling indifference. For a time we both forgot the others in the party. I was absorbed in him as we talked together and he lounged there in his summer flannels.2
As their talk grew more intimate, Roland confessed that he had felt an immediate attraction to Blanche but had held back because he thought that she “had eyes only for Morgan.” Blanche assured him that Morgan, though a delightful host, meant nothing to her.
By then, she had discovered something else about Roland that strengthened her belief that she and the handsome young man were, as she put it, en rapport: Roland was a music lover. “He had gone frequently to the Opera and numbered amongst his friends a few gifted people known in the musical life of New York.”
When Blanche told Roland of her “own ambitions and work,” he revealed that he held season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera.
“If you wish,” he said with his engaging smile, “you shall have a surfeit of music this winter.”
“To be surfeited would be impossible,” she cried. “But to have a feast of music—how wonderful that would be!”3
Soon afterward, their tête-à-tête was interrupted by the appearance of Morgan and the others, who came over to join them. Blanche records in her memoirs that, for the rest of that day, “there was only a brief word or two exchanged between us; but I found myself frequently turning to glimpse him as we mingled with the others; and always his eyes followed me; and it was as though a silent and intriguing understanding had already begun to exist.”4
According to Blanche, her first encounter with Roland Molineux ended around sunset, when she, Isia, Clark Miller, and his two male friends returned to the Monhegan aboard the launch that had carried them to the Viator earlier that day:
We descended to the motor boat which had been bobbing alongside. Once more it noisily churned the waters and, leaving a long path of white foam in its wake, swung back to the other pleasure craft. The sails of Clark’s racy schooner-yacht bellied out to the wind. Turning, she nosed into the channel and cruised slowly out through the sparkling blue waters of the bay….
The Viator with Morgan’s guests aboard still lay anchored in Portland harbor. Those of us aboard the Monhegan were now heading in before a stiff breeze that swept the waters off Beaver Tail. The sky had faded from rose—that shade like the inner heart of a shell—to opal and mother-of-pearl. The pearl drifted into blue-gray against the horizon, and the sea and sky blended into one. The wind stiffened and ruffled the surface of the waters into wavering threads of white. The great sails also caught the force of it, and we were cutting through, clean as the blade of a knife. We keeled far over, and soon the decks were awash so that we were drenched with the flying spray. I sat huddled on the upper edge of the companionway. My hair was wet, my frock limp with the spindrift….
Clark came and wrapped a great coat about me. We laughed in high glee, like children. How tremendously exciting it was!5
That, at any rate, was Blanche’s official version of events. Other people privy to what transpired on board the Viator had a different tale to tell.
According to these sources, at the end of that intoxicating, champagne-soaked day, the men and women aboard Morgan’s yacht—Blanche and Isia included—paired off, and a mock marriage ceremony was held for each couple. Then each set of make-believe newlyweds retired to a stateroom, intending to indulge in a very real consummation of their union.6
Which of these accounts is true has never been definitively established. In any case, the outcome—in one very crucial sense—was the same.
As events would show, Blanche, despite her earnest wish to divest herself of her virginity, returned from her trip aboard the pleasure-craft Viator still innocent of (as she put it) the “full realization of sex.”