NATE DIMEO: Arabella Worsham was 17 when she came to New York in 1868, with nothing in her pocket. Or she was 15 and it was 1865. There's a lot we don't know about the early life of the woman who got dressed in this room, and it seems she may have wanted it that way. She told some people she was born in Virginia, others it was Alabama.

There are stories that say she was married to a Mr. John Worsham when she came to New York in eighteen sixty-something. Some stories say he died, leaving her a heartbroken widow, others that he abandoned her and their infant son. Still, others say they were never married at all. And maybe all of it, all of these stories were a useful fiction. Because here's the deal.

Arabella was a single teen mom in New York. She had no pedigree. Her father died when she was nine. Her mother ran a boarding house. She had no connections, no entry into polite society, no prospects. She was, in short, the sort of woman who would never get to get dressed in beautiful clothes in a beautiful room like this.

Never mind get to build a room like this to her taste, to her whim, in 1881. A room so beautiful, it is rebuilt here at the Metropolitan Museum, 140ish years later. And somehow she made sure we don't know just how or just when she met a man named Collis Huntington, a titan of industry who built his vast fortune building the transcontinental railroad.

He was broad-chested and kind-eyed, and married. And somehow, Arabella became his constant companion in business trips, at lunch with senators. And people may have raised their eyebrows, but they never raised the issue. Some may have remarked that Arabella’s son looked quite a bit like Huntington himself, but they were sure not to remark too loudly. He was merely a philanthropist who had taken an interest in assisting a young widow, or an abandoned woman, or whomever she was in whichever story she was telling about her early life.

Later in her life, Arabella would become the second Mrs. Huntington. She would become a fixture not just of New York society, but of Parisian society, of London society, California society. She would become a real estate magnate. She would become an important collector of art and of jewelry. She would become a philanthropist in her own right. She would become known as the wealthiest woman on earth.

But that was years later. Let's get back to this room where she used to get dressed before all of that becoming.

Back when Arabella Huntington was still calling herself Arabella Worsham. Whether that was true or not. When she, who had come to this town as a teenager with nothing, no pedigree, no prospects, now had a patron, possibly a lover in the grand home on 54th Street she bought with his money and a vision for that home, and a room of her own.

This room, here, where she would put on fine things she once could have only dreamed of wearing. And this woman built this room in 1881. She had a visionary designer, had artisans and laborers, many, many men at her command. She wanted this satin wood. And here is the satin wood in the door frames and the drawers, in the cabinet doors, shipped across the Pacific, hauled across the continent in the backs of railroad cars on tracks likely built by the man who gave her the money to build this room.

She wanted cherubs, and here are cherubs, each painted by hand, up by the ceiling, or carved by hand here by the door. There, framing the armoire, carved in purple heart. The wood from a flowering tree felled in the forests of Brazil or French Guiana. Now, here, in this fine room, for the pleasure of one young woman from Virginia or Alabama, or wherever she was really from, she wanted butterflies and blossoms, fleeting Springtime. And there is Spring forever in the basement, beneath the mirror by the window. She wanted flowers, wending vines climbing the closet doors with their impossible symmetry, twisting and turning in accordance with her wishes into something new and improbable, but seemingly natural and effortless, as though they’d sprung from the soil, from mere seed and water and air.

Those are silver handles there, on the door, at the sink. Sure to tarnish one day, but not tonight. Not on this night that I'd like you to imagine now. 1881, 1882, when Arabella Worsham neé Yarrington, not yet Arabella Huntington, not yet 30 years old, would come into this room, from the bedroom, from the door you may have just walked through and open up her closet of dresses, pulled drawers of perfumes and hairpins and pearls, like the ones that hang from the hands of the hand-painted cherubs.

And she'd get ready for the evening. She could look out the window that once looked toward Park Avenue, where other fine homes were beginning to rise even taller, but not yet tall enough to block her view of the river and the boroughs beyond, beginning to fill with new immigrants, new arrivals to the city who'd come here with something like nothing, like her, but who were not like her, who hadn't pulled off this trick of building a life out of stories.

Weren't sitting in this room on this night. Getting dressed for the evening, for the opera, for some fine party with fine people. Someday she would marry a railroad magnate. Someday she would build grand estates and acquire Vermeers and Rembrandts. And the only Gainsborough everyone knows. Someday she would crisscross the continent in the Atlantic dozens of times. Someday she would be known as the richest woman in the world.

But not yet. On this night, she would get ready for the evening, and she'd step out of this room and into the world.