At home, Wallacks Point.

ONE watches, and says very little, when the lady of the house is pursuing a vision. The sun room soon became the bordello the Shah couldn't afford. Then the living room, a kind of Haitian concentrate. Self-respect required me at one point to insist on a room of my own--a music room, featuring a beautiful harpsichord, and the worst keyboard artist since Harry Truman. I got as far as the windows and the paintings (they are all by the fine Raymond de Botton); but She took over, which is why the room--its window framing the garden, a slender tree trunk trained like a geisha girl from childhood to give pleasure, the largest wild apple tree our tree man has ever seen, and out there Long Island Sound, with as many moods as those ersatz fountains the big hotels are constructing, with the Teamster Aeolus, who will blow you up a storm, or whisper the sea into kitten-like placidity--is correspondingly beautiful on the inside. There in the winter, the fireplace alight, a proper musician performing, live or on record, you can see what the pilgrims saw, as if under glass, and understand the compulsion to thanksgiving.