“… I’m going to take a store opposite the Waldorf-Astoria… all our fine customers live uptown and they want me to move up higher… I have been on the waiting list for a store on 33^rd Street and have secured one right opposite the ladies entrance of Waldorf, and expect to sign the lease tomorrow … As our goods appeal only to the very wealthy class why it behoves me to get up among them. The store is just eight feet wide, with a show window, and forty-eight feet deep and it is up to me to make that one of the most beautiful and artistic stores in New York. It will cost me about eight hundred dollars to tear things out and get everything as I want it. My idea is to have the walls white satin striped with a border of pale pink roses showering down in long strips, pale green Royal Tilton carpets, green velvet furniture made to order, ferns in gold vases and on the opening day, the first of March, there will be masses of flowers everywhere. And … I have designed a new theatre hat that is going to shake New York, it is a dream… we do not want anyone to copy it until I get it patented… I’ll have my private office in the back, you know I do not appear in the business, I just create and boss and rake in the ‘mon.’ … I must be doing something the stagnation of Stroudsburg is killing. My factory is running day and night rushing these theatre hats... I am also putting 200,000 bottles of Diane de Poictiers Co.’s Violet de Russie on the market… Court won’t let me go South on account of the old Bond Case coming up next month, so I have just branched out into a big business venture and I am spending slathers of money, which I will get back hundred-fold. I am never at fault in a business venture, barring the Hotel which I must take up very shortly to rent or sell… the American Bank Note people are making all my labels with a picture of Diane de Poictiers in colors, they do such fine work. Rent of store is fifteen hundred dollars.”

Collins was evidently an ambitious entrepreneur – with old legal problems and debts – who had left rural Pennsylvania behind to seek his fortune in the big city. He was apparently not unsuccessful, at least in the perfume line. We could find only one reference to Diane de Poictiers Violet de Russie – in a 1906 issue of an obscure Nurse’s magazine, which stated that this was a new ‘epoch-making” venture of the Freewood Perfume Company, which was offering their “famous” flower fragrance, with its “particularly dainty odor”, in “an attractively labeled glass stoppered bottle, tied with violet ribbons” – without any expense “wasted on fancy boxes.” New York newspapers of 1909 make no mention of Collins’ grandiose plans, so perhaps the Waldorf area lease was never signed.