However lovely the mountain, it's cold in the winter, and the Minx and I are not as hardy as the iron miners who used to live up there. Over a few fall and winter weekends, we explored the extravagant local lowland inns instead. We took ourselves to the Mayflower Inn, a paean to upholstered luxury Connecticut style. Adrianna Mnuchin, who rebuilt the hundred-year-old property fifteen years ago, has a nose for what rich ladies like; today, the inn also has an excellent spa, where I was patted and washed and moisturized into an overheated swoon, only to be swaddled in infant-soft chenille blankets on a white chaise longue to recuperate. Through an enormous picture window, I could see the lawn, dusted with ice crystals, sloping down to the pond. Everything was muted grays and browns—the water, the bracken, the frozen ashy brown limbs of the trees—the view hypnotic. I could hear the loons hooting in the distance.

On another very cold weekend—the ground covered with a confectioner's dusting of sugary snow, the air sharp and brittle enough to sting, the atmosphere clear for miles, sunny and bright blue—we stayed at Winvian, in Morris, a haute if strange fantasy of playtime for grown-ups. Each cabin is an architectural folly on a Connecticut theme—from Skull and Bones to Camping to Treehouse. When we stepped into our cottage, a five-star version of a trapper's cabin called Beaver Lodge, the Minx shrieked, "A real fireplace!" and other such cries that showed her appreciation. As we indulged in the homemade petits fours, lay in bed oohing and aahing over the magnificent actual beaver's den embedded in the ceiling and the flat-screen TV (which at the push of a button rose up out of a sideboard), and admired the feel on our feet of the heated floor of river stones in the bath, the image of eighteenth-century French aristocracy playacting the virtues of the simple life flitted through my head. We were Marie Antoinette and Madame de Pompadour in our trapper's cabin de luxe. The Minx penciled her approval in the guest book: "Beaver heaven!"

We were hardly the first in the area to enjoy the pleasure of female company in sumptuous surroundings. Reggie the Potter had recommended Topsmead State Forest, five-hundred-plus acres just east of Litchfield, as a wonderful place for a walk. Formerly the summer estate of one Edith Chase, a brass industry heiress, the park extends around the faux Cotswolds Tudor cottage she built at great expense in 1925 and furnished with an eccentric collection of antiques. Edith summered there with her friend Mary Burrall and Mary's sister, Lucy, for about fifty years. Sometime after the house was finished, she built a "dovecote" off the garden, a two-story tower—all the windows of which face away from the house itself—that contained a bedroom and bath for any male guest who might have the misfortune to arrive. In line with Miss Chase's prescribed "quiet visitation and passive recreation," we wandered the gardens and grounds, strolled down to the pond, and wished we'd brought a picnic.