By the time she was sixteen Sara Sherman Wiborg (she was named for General William Tecumseh Sherman, her mother’s favorite uncle) had learned to speak fluent French, German, and Italian. She was not in the slightest degree impressed by fashionable society, however, and she said just what she thought to everyone. “I love Sara,” Lady Diana said to Mrs. Wiborg. “She’s a cat who goes her own way.” Sara became a great favorite of her mother’s friend Stella Campbell (Mrs. Patrick Campbell), who used to insist that Sara accompany her when she went to buy clothes for one of her theatrical roles. “Sara, darling,” she would say, in her deep, Italianate voice, “does the dress walk? Or does it make me look just like a cigar?” Gerald Murphy said once that although he had known Sara for eleven years before they were married and could hardly relate an incident in his life in which she did not play a part, she had remained so essentially and naively original that “to this day I have no idea what she will do, say, or propose.”
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