“I always do everything first,” she said, according to her friend Elizabeth “Bessie” Drexel Lehr, wife of Harry Lehr, the society walker who stepped into Ward McAllister’s shoes. “I blaze the trail for the rest to walk in. I was the first girl of my ‘set’ to marry a Vanderbilt. Then I was the first society woman to ask for a divorce, and within a year ever so many others had followed my example. They had been wanting divorce all the time, but they had not dared to do it until I showed them the way.”
