All those generations of importance and grandeur to live up to. "What I enjoy most," he said, "is living like an aristocrat without the burden of having to be one. Williams was smoking a King Edward cigarillo. Mercer House was the envy of house-proud Savannah. A book on the interiors of the world's great houses featured it alongside Sagamore Hill, Biltmore, and Chartwell. Architectural Digest had devoted six pages to it. If Mercer House was not quite the biggest private house in Savannah, it was certainly the most grandly furnished. Together with the walled garden and the carriage house in back, it occupied an entire city block. It was Mercer House, one of the last of Savannah's great houses still in private hands. There was a ballroom on the second floor. A graceful spiral stairway rose from the center hall toward a domed skylight. It was a mansion, really, with fifteen-foot ceilings and large, well-proportioned rooms. We were sitting in the living room of his Victorian house. He was tall, about fifty, with darkly handsome, almost sinister features: a neatly trimmed mustache, hair turning sliver at the temples, and eyes so black they were like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine - he could see out, but you couldn't see in.
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