Faith knew the Somerset Club in Boston, though she had never been inside the massive stone mansion at 42 Beacon Street that suggested a fortress more than the convivial social club, founded in 1851 or even earlier according to some accounts. Asking about membership was a guarantee of exclusion. It was the snootiest and perhaps the wealthiest of Boston’s formerly all-male social clubs. The story most often told about the Somerset was an accurate one: when a fire broke out in the 1940s, the firemen were made to use the servants’ entrance.