It was fortunate that the man who had designed and built the ten houses along Hampden Lane in 1788 had built them to the same scale, albeit in different configurations. Lenox’s and Lady Jane’s houses both had twelve-foot-deep basements where the staff could work and live, eight-step front stairs that led to broad front doors (his was red, hers white), four floors of rooms, and a narrow back garden. It meant they fit together.

Still, to join them had taken a great deal of ingenuity on the part of a young builder named, aptly enough, Stackhouse. On the first floor he had knocked down the wall between their two dining rooms, creating a single long hall, which could now entertain fifty people or so. More importantly, it had left intact the two most important rooms in the house: Lady Jane’s sitting room, a rose colored square where she entertained her friends and took her tea, and Lenox’s study, a long, lived-in chamber full of overstuffed armchairs, with books lining every surface and a desk piled under hundreds of papers and trinkets. Its high windows looked over the street, and on the opposite end its fireplace was where Lenox sat with his friends.