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The Sisters-In-Law: A Novel of Our Time

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton · English · Gutenberg #8535 · 650,791 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Sisters-In-Law: A Novel of Our Time

Author: Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8535]
                Most recently updated: August 29, 2012

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SISTERS-IN-LAW: A NOVEL OF OUR TIME ***




Produced by Tiffany Vergon, Charles Aldarondo and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team











THE SISTERS-IN-LAW

A NOVEL OF OUR TIME

BY GERTRUDE ATHERTON






TO DR. ALANSON WEEKS OF SAN FRANCISCO






Several people who enter casually into this novel are leading
characters in other novels and stories of the "California Series,"
which covers the social history of the state from the beginning of the
last century. They are Gwynne, his mother, Lady Victoria Gwynne, Isabel
Otis and the Hofers in ANCESTORS; the Randolphs in A DAUGHTER OF THE
VINE; Lee Tarlton, Lady Barnstable, Lady Arrowmount, Coralie Geary, the
Montgomerys and Trennahans in TRANSPLANTED and THE CALIFORNIANS;
Rezánov in the novel of that name, and Chonita Iturbi y Moncada in THE
DOOMSWOMAN, both bound in the volume, BEFORE THE GRINGO CAME; The Price
Ruylers in THE AVALANCHE.





BOOK I




CHAPTER I



I


The long street rising and falling and rising again until its farthest
crest high in the east seemed to brush the fading stars, was deserted
even by the private watchmen that guarded the homes of the apprehensive
in the Western Addition. Alexina darted across and into the shadows of
the avenue that led up to her old-fashioned home, a relic of San
Francisco's "early days," perched high on the steepest of the casual
hills in that city of a hundred hills.

She was breathless and rather frightened, for although of an
adventurous spirit, which had led her to slide down the pillars of the
verandah at night when her legs were longer than her years, and during
the past winter to make a hardly less dignified exit by a side door
when her worthy but hopelessly Victorian mother was asleep, this was
the first time that she had been out after midnight.

And it was five o'clock in the morning!

She had gone with Aileen Lawton, her mother's pet aversion, to a party
given by one of those new people whom Mrs. Groome, a massive if
crumbling pillar of San Francisco's proud old aristocracy, held in
pious disdain, and had danced in the magnificent ballroom with the
tireless exhilaration of her eighteen years until the weary band had
played Home Sweet Home.

She had never imagined that any entertainment could be so brilliant,
even among the despised nouveaux riches, nor that there were so many
flowers even in California. Her own coming-out party in the dark double
parlors of the old house among the eucalyptus trees, whose moans and
sighs could be heard above the thin music of piano and violin, had been
so formal and dull that she had cried herself to sleep after the last
depressed member of the old set had left on the stroke of midnight.
Even Aileen's high mocking spirits had failed her, and she had barely
been able to summon them for a moment as she kissed the friend, to whom
she was sincerely devoted, a sympathetic good-night.

"Never mind, old girl. Nothing can ever be worse. Not even your own
funeral. That's one comfort."



II


That had been last November. During the ensuing five months Alexina had
been taken by her mother to such entertainments as were given by other
members of that distinguished old band, whose glory, like Mrs. Groome's
own, had reached its meridian in the last of the eighties.

Not that any one else in San Francisco was quite as exclusive as Mrs.
Groome. Others might be as faithful in their way to the old tradition,
be as proud of their inviolate past, when "money did not count," and
people merely "new," or of unknown ancestry, did not venture to knock
at the gates: but the successive flocks of young folks had overpowered
their conservative parents, and Society had loosened its girdle, until
in this year of grace nineteen-hundred-and-six, there were few rich
people so hopelessly new that their ball rooms either in San Francisco
or "Down the Peninsula," were unknown to a generation equally
determined to enjoy life and indifferent to traditions.

Mrs. Groome alone had set her face obdurately against any change in the
personnel of the eighties. She had the ugliest old house in San
Francisco, and the change from lamps to gas had been her last
concession to the march of time. The bath tubs were tin and the double
parlors crowded with the imposing carved Italian furniture whose like
every member of her own set had, in the seventies and eighties, brought
home after their frequent and prolonged sojourns abroad: for the
prouder the people of that era were of their lofty social position on
the edge of the Pacific, the more time did they spend in Europe.

Mrs. Groome might be compelled therefore to look at new people in the
homes of her friends--even her proud daughter, Mrs. Abbott, had
unaccountably surrendered to the meretricious glitter of
Burlingame--but she would not meet them, she would not permit Alexina
to cross their thresholds, nor should the best of them ever cross her
own.

Poor Alexina, forced to submit, her mother placidly impervious to
coaxings, tears, and storms, had finally compromised the matter to the
satisfaction of herself and of her own close chosen friend, Aileen
Lawton. She accompanied her mother with outward resignation to small
dinner dances and to the Matriarch balls, presided over by the newly
elected social leader, a lady of unimpeachable Southern ancestry and
indifference to wealth, who pledged her Virginia honor to Mrs. Groome
that Alexina should not be introduced to any young man whose name was
not on her own visiting list; and, while her mother slept, the last of
the Ballinger-Groomes accompanied Aileen (chaperoned by an unprincipled
aunt, who was an ancient enemy of Maria Groome) to parties quite as
respectable but infinitely gayer, and indubitably mixed.

She was quite safe, for Mrs. Groome, when free of social duties,
retired on the stroke of nine with a novel, and turned off the gas at
ten. She never read the society columns of the newspapers, choked as
they were with unfamiliar and plebeian names; and her friends,
regarding Alexina's gay disobedience as a palatable joke on "poor old
Maria," and sympathetic with youth, would have been the last to
enlighten her.



III


Alexina had never enjoyed herself more than to-night. Young Mrs. Hofer,
who had bought and remodeled the old Polk house on Nob Hill--the very
one in which Mrs. Groome's oldest daughter had made her début in the
far-off eighties--had turned all her immense rooms into a bower of
every variety of flower that bloomed on the rich California soil. It
was her second great party of the season, and it had been her avowed
intention to outdo the first, which had attempted a revival of Spanish
California and been the talk of the town. The decorations had been done
by a firm of young women whose parents and grandparents had danced in
the old house, and the catering by another scion of San Francisco's
social founders, Miss Anne Montgomery.

To do Mrs. Groome full justice, all of these enterprising young women
were welcome in her own home. She regarded it as unfortunate that
ladies were forced to work for their living, but had seen too many San
Francisco families in her own youth go down to ruin to feel more than
sorrow. In that era the wives of lost millionaires had knitted baby
socks and starved slowly. Even she was forced to admit that the newer
generation was more fortunate in its opportunities.

Alexina had not gone to Mrs. Hofer's first party, Aileen being in Santa
Barbara, but she had sniffed at the comparisons of the more critical
girls in their second season. She was quite convinced that nothing so
splendid had ever been given in the world. She had danced every dance.
She had had the most delicious things to eat, and never had she met so
charming a young man as Mortimer Dwight.

"Some party," she thought as she ran up the steep avenue to her
sacrosanct abode, where her haughty mother was chastely asleep, secure
in the belief that her obedient little daughter was dreaming in her
maiden bower.

"What the poor old darling doesn't know 'll never hurt her," thought
Alexina gayly. "She really is old enough to be my grandmother, anyhow.
I wonder if Maria and Sally really stood for it or were as naughty as I
am."

Alexina was the youngest of a long line of boys and girls, all of whom
but five were dead. Ballinger and Geary practiced law in New York,
having married sisters who refused to live elsewhere. Sally had married
one of their Harvard friends and dwelt in Boston. Maria alone had wed
an indigenous Californian, an Abbott of Alta in the county of San
Mateo, and lived the year round in that old and exclusive borough. She
was now so like her mother, barring a very slight loosening of her own
social girdle, that Alexina dismissed as fantastic the notion that even
a quarter of a century earlier she may have had any of the promptings
of rebellious youth.

"Not she!" thought Alexina grimly. "Oh, Lord! I wonder if my summer
destiny is Alta."




CHAPTER II



I


She was quite breathless as she reached the eucalyptus grove and paused
for a moment before slipping into the house and climbing the stairs.

The city lying in the valleys and on the hills arrested her attention,
for it was a long while since she had been awake and out of doors at
five in the morning.

It looked like the ghost of a city in that pallid dawn. The houses
seemed to have huddled together as if in fear before they sank into
sleep, to crouch close to the earth as if warding off a blow. Only the
ugly dome of the City Hall, the church steeples, and the old shot tower
held up their heads, and they had an almost terrifying sharpness of
outline, of alertness, as if ready to spring.

In that far-off district known as "South of Market Street," which she
had never entered save in a closed carriage on her way to the Southern
Pacific Station or to pay a yearly call on some old family that still
dwelt on that oasis, Rincon Hill--sole outpost of the social life of
the sixties--infrequent thin lines of smoke rose from humble chimneys.
It was the region of factories and dwellings of the working-class, but
its inhabitants were not early risers in these days of high wages and
short hours.

Even those gray spirals ascended as if the atmosphere lay heavy on
them. They accentuated the lifelessness, the petrifaction, the intense
and sinister quiet of the prostrate city.

Alexina shuddered and her volatile spirits winged their way down into
those dark and intuitive depths of her mind she had never found time to
plumb. She knew that the hour of dawn was always still, but she had
never imagined a stillness so complete, so final as this. Nor was there
any fresh lightness in the morning air. It seemed to press downward
like an enormous invisible bat; or like the shade of buried cities,
vain outcroppings of a vanished civilization, brooding menacingly over
this recent flimsy accomplishment of man that Nature could obliterate
with a sneer.

Alexina, holding her breath, glanced upward. That ghost of evening's
twilight, the sad gray of dawn, had retreated, but not before the
crimson rays of sunrise. The unflecked arc above was a hard and steely
blue. It looked as if marsh lights would play over its horrid surface
presently, and then come crashing down as the pillars of the earth gave
way.



II


Alexina was a child of California and knew what was coming. She barely
had time to brace herself when she saw the sleeping city jar as if
struck by a sudden squall, and with the invisible storm came a loud
menacing roar of imprisoned forces making a concerted rush for freedom.

She threw her arms about one of the trees, but it was bending and
groaning with an accent of fear, a tribute it would have scorned to
offer the mighty winds of the Pacific. Alexina sprang clear of it and
unable to keep her feet sat down on the bouncing earth.

Then she remembered that it was a rigid convention among real
Californians to treat an earthquake as a joke, and began to laugh.
There was nothing hysterical in this perfunctory tribute to the lesser
tradition and it immediately restored her courage. Moreover, the
curiosity she felt for all phases of life, psychical and physical, and
her naïve delight in everything that savored of experience, caused her
to stare down upon the city now tossing and heaving like the sea in a
hurricane, with an almost impersonal interest.

The houses seemed to clutch at their precarious foundations even while
they danced to the tune of various and appalling noises. Above the
ascending roar of the earthquake Alexina heard the crashing of
steeples, the dome of the City Hall, of brick buildings too hastily
erected, of ten thousand falling chimneys; of creaking and grinding
timbers, and of the eucalyptus trees behind her, whose leaves rustled
with a shrill rising whisper that seemed addressed to heaven; the
neighing and pawing of horses in the stables, the sharp terrified yelps
of dogs; and through all a long despairing wail. The mountains across
the bay and behind the city were whirling in a devil's dance and the
scattered houses on their slopes looked like drunken gnomes. The shot
tower bowed low and solemnly but did not fall.



III


As the earth with a final leap and twist settled abruptly into peace,
the streets filled suddenly with people, many in their nightclothes,
but more in dressing-gowns, opera cloaks, and overcoats. All were
silent and apparently self-possessed. Whence came that long wail no one
ever knew.

Alexina, remembering her own attire, sprang to her feet and ran through
the little side door and up the stair, praying that her mother, with
her usual monumental poise, would have disdained to rise. She had never
been known to leave her room before eight.

But as Alexina ran along the upper hall she became only too aware that
Mrs. Groome had surrendered to Nature, for she was pounding on her door
and in a haughty but quivering voice demanding to be let out.

Alexina tiptoed lightly to the threshold of her room and called out
sympathetically:

"What is the matter, mother dear! Has your door sprung?"

"It has. Tell James to come here at once and bring a crow-bar if
necessary."

"Yes, darling."

Alexina let down her hair and tore off her evening gown, kicking it
into a closet, then threw on a bathrobe and ran over to the servants'
quarters in an extension behind the house. They were deserted, but wild
shrieks and gales of unseemly laughter arose from the yard. She opened
a window and saw the cook, a recent importation, on the ground in
hysterics, the housemaid throwing water on her, and the inherited
butler calmly lighting his pipe.

"James," she called. "My mother's door is jammed. Please come right
away."

"Yes, miss." He knocked his pipe against the wall and ground out the
life of the coal with his slippered heel. "Just what happened to your
grandmother in the 'quake of sixty-eight. I mind the time I had getting
her out."



IV


It was quite half an hour before the door yielded to the combined
efforts of James and the gardener-coachman, and during the interval
Mrs. Groome recovered her poise and made her morning toilette.

She had taken her iron-gray hair from its pins and patted the narrow
row of frizzes into place; the flat side bands, the concise coil of
hair on top were as severely disdainful of untoward circumstance or
passing fashion as they had been any morning these forty years or more.

She wore old-fashioned corsets and was abdominally correct for her
years; a long gown of black voile with white polka dots, and a guimpe
of white net whose raff of chiffon somewhat disguised the wreck of her
throat. On her shoulders, disposed to rheumatism, she wore a tippet of
brown marabout feathers, and in her ears long jet earrings.

She had the dark brown eyes of the Ballingers, but they were bleared at
the rims, and on the downward slope of her fine aquiline nose she wore
spectacles that looked as if mounted in cast iron. Altogether an
imposing relic; and "that built-up look" as Aileen expressed it, was
the only one that would have suited her mental style. Mrs. Abbott, who
dressed with a profound regard for fashion, had long since concluded
that her mother's steadfast alliance with the past not only became her
but was a distinct family asset. Only a woman of her overpowering
position could afford it.

Mrs. Groome's skin had never felt the guilty caress of cold-cream or
powder, and if it was mahogany in tint and deeply wrinkled, it was at
least as respectable as her past. In her day that now bourgeois
adjective--twin to genteel--had been synchronous with the equally
obsolete word swell, but it had never occurred to even the more modern
Mrs. Abbott and her select inner circle of friends, dwelling on family
estates in the San Mateo valley, to change in this respect at least
with the changing times.



V


Alexina had washed the powder from her own fresh face and put on a
morning frock of green and brown gingham, made not by her mother's
dressmaker but by her sister's. Her soft dusky hair, regardless of the
fashion of the moment, was brushed back from her forehead and coiled at
the base of her beautiful little head. Her long widely set gray eyes,
their large irises very dark and noticeably brilliant even for youth,
had the favor of black lashes as fine and lusterless as her hair, and
very narrow black polished eyebrows. Her skin was a pale olive lightly
touched with color, although the rather large mouth with its definitely
curved lips was scarlet. Her long throat like the rest of her body was
white.

All the other children had been clean-cut Ballingers or Groomes,
consistently dark or fair; but it would seem that Nature, taken by
surprise when the little Alexina came along several years after her
mother was supposed to have discharged her debt, had mixed the colors
hurriedly and quite forgotten her usual nice proportions.

The face, under the soft lines of youth, was less oval than it looked,
for the chin was square and the jaw bone accentuated. The short
straight thin nose reclaimed the face and head from too classic a
regularity, and the thin nostrils drew in when she was determined and
shook quite alarmingly when she was angry.

These more significant indications of her still embryonic personality
were concealed by the lovely curves and tints of her years, the
brilliant happy candid eyes (which she could convert into a madonna's
by the simple trick of lifting them a trifle and showing a lower
crescent of devotional white), the love of life and eagerness to enjoy
that radiated from her thin admirably proportioned body, which, at this
time, held in the limp slouching fashion of the hour, made her look
rather small. In reality she was nearly as tall as her mother or the
dignified Mrs. Abbott, who rejoiced in every inch of her five feet
eight, and retained the free erect carriage of her girlhood.

Alexina, with a sharp glance about her disordered room, hastily
disarranged her bed, and, sending her ball slippers after the gown, ran
across the hall and threw herself into her mother's arms.

"Some earthquake, what? You are sure you are not hurt, mommy dear? The
plaster is down all over the house."

"More slang that you have learned from Aileen Lawton, I presume. It
certainly was a dreadful earthquake, worse than that of
eighteen-sixty-eight. Is anything valuable broken? There is always less
damage done on the hills. What is that abominable noise?"

The cook, who had recovered from her first attack, was emitting another
volley of shrieks, in which the word "fire" could be distinguished in
syllables of two.

Mrs. Groome rang the bell violently and the imperturbable James
appeared.

"Is the house on fire?"

"No, ma'am; only the city. It's worth looking at, if you care to step
out on the lawn."

Mrs. Groome followed her daughter downstairs and out of the house. Her
eyebrows were raised but there was a curious sensation in her knees
that even the earthquake had failed to induce. She sank into the chair
James had provided and clutched the arms with both hands.

"There are always fires after earthquakes," she muttered. "Impossible!
Impossible!"

"Oh, do you think San Francisco is really going?" cried Alexina, but
there was a thrill in her regret. "Oh, but it couldn't be."

"No! impossible, impossible!"

Black clouds of smoke shot with red tongues of flame overhung the city
at different points, although they appeared to be more dense and
frequent down in the "South of Market Street" region. There was also a
rolling mass of flame above the water front and sporadic fires in the
business district.

The streets were black with people, now fully dressed, and long
processions were moving steadily toward the bay as well as in the
direction of the hills behind the western rim of the city. James
brought a pair of field glasses, and Mrs. Groome discovered that the
hurrying throngs were laden with household goods, many pushing them in
baby carriages and wheelbarrows. It was the first flight of the
refugees.

"James!" said Mrs. Groome sharply. "Bring me a cup of coffee and then
go down and find out exactly what is happening."

James, too wise in the habits of earthquakes to permit the still
distracted cook to make a fire in the range, brewed the coffee over a
spirit lamp, and then departed, nothing loath, on his mission. Mrs.
Groome swallowed the coffee hastily, handed the cup to Alexina and
burst into tears.

"Mother!" Alexina was really terrified for the first time that morning.
Mrs. Groome practiced the severe code, the repressions of her class,
and what tears she had shed in her life, even over the deaths of those
almost forgotten children, had been in the sanctity of her bedroom.
Alexina, who had grown up under her wing, after many sorrows and trials
had given her a serenity that was one secret of her power over this
impulsive child of her old age, could hardly have been more appalled if
her mother had been stricken with paralysis.

"You cannot understand," sobbed Mrs. Groome. "This is my city! The city
of my youth; the city my father helped to make the great and wonderful
city it is. Even your father--he may not have been a good husband--Oh,
no! Not he!--but he was a good citizen; he helped to drag San Francisco
out of the political mire more than once. And now it is going! It has
always been prophesied that San Francisco would burn to the ground some
time, and now the time has come. I feel it in my bones."

This was the first reference other than perfunctory, that Alexina had
ever heard her mother make to her father, who had died when she was
ten. The girl realized abruptly that this elderly parent who, while
uniformly kind, had appeared to be far above the ordinary weaknesses of
her sex, had an inner life which bound her to the plane of mere
mortals. She had a sudden vision of an unhappy married life, silently
borne, a life of suppressions, bitter disappointments. Her chief
compensation had been the unwavering pride which had made the world
forget to pity her.

And it was the threatened destruction of her city that had beaten down
the defenses and given her youngest child a brief glimpse of that
haughty but shivering spirit.



VI


Alexina's mind, in spite of a great deal of worldly garnering with an
industrious and investigating scythe, was as immature as her years, for
she had felt little and lived not at all. But she had swift and deep
intuitions, and in spite of the natural volatility of youth, free of
care, she was fundamentally emotional and intense.

Swept from her poor little girlish moorings in the sophisticated sea of
the twentieth-century maiden, she had a sudden wild access of
conscience; she flung herself into her mother's arms and poured out the
tale of her nocturnal transgressions, her frequent excursions into the
forbidden realm of modern San Francisco, of her immense acquaintance
with people whose very names were unknown to Mrs. Groome, born
Ballinger.

Then she scrambled to her feet and stood twisting her hands together,
expecting a burst of wrath that would further reveal the pent-up fires
in this long-sealed volcano; for Alexina was inclined to the
exaggerations of her sex and years and would not have been surprised if
her mother, masterpiece of a lost art, had suddenly become as
elementary as the forces that had devastated San Francisco.

But there was only dismay in Mrs. Groome's eyes as she stared at her
repentant daughter. Her heart sank still lower. She had never been a
vain woman, but she had prided herself upon not feeling old. Suddenly,
she felt very old, and helpless.

"Well," she said in a moment. "Well--I suppose I have been wrong. There
are almost two generations between us. I haven't kept up. And you are
naturally a truthful child--I should have--"

"Oh, mother, you are not blaming yourself!" Alexina felt as if the
earth once more were dancing beneath her unsteady feet. "Don't say
that!"

The sharpness of her tone dispelled the confusion in Mrs. Groome's
mind. She hastily buckled on her armor.

"Let us say no more about it. I fancy it will be a long time before
there are any more parties in San Francisco, but when there are--well,
I shall consult Maria. I want your youth to be happy--as happy as mine
was. I suppose you young people can only be happy in the new way, but I
wish conditions had not changed so lamentably in San Francisco.... Who
is this?"




CHAPTER III



I


As Alexina followed her mother's eyes she flushed scarlet and turned
away her head. A young man was coming up the avenue. He was a very
gallant figure, moderately tall and very straight; he held his head
high, his features were strong in outline. But the noticeable thing
about him at this early hour of the morning and in the wake of a great
disaster was his consummate grooming.

"That--that--" stammered Alexina, "is Mr. Dwight. I met him last night
at the Hofers'."

The young man raised his hat and came forward quickly. "I hope you will
forgive me," he said with a charming deference, "but I couldn't resist
coming to see if you were all right. So many people are frightened of
fire--in their own houses."

"Mr. Dwight--my mother--"

He lifted his hat again. Mrs. Groome in her chastened mood regarded him
favorably, and for the moment without suspicion. At least he was a
gentleman; but who could he be?

"Dwight," she murmured. "I do not know the name. Were you born here?"

"I was born in Utica, New York. My parents came here when I was quite
young. We--always lived rather quietly."

"But you go about now? To all these parties?"

"Oh, yes. I like to dance after the day's work. But I am not what you
would call a society man. I haven't the time."

Mrs. Groome was not usually blunt, but she suddenly scented danger and
she had not fully recovered her poise.

"You are in business?" She disliked business intensely. All gentlemen
of her day had followed one of the professions.

"I am in a wholesale commission house. But I hope to be in business for
myself one day."

"Ah."

Still, all young men in this terrible twentieth century could not be
lawyers. Mrs. Groome knew enough of the march of time to be aware of
the increasing difficulties in gaining a bare livelihood. Tom Abbott
was a lawyer, like his father before him, and his grandfather in the
fifties. It was one of the oldest firms in San Francisco, but she
recalled his frequent and bitter allusions to the necessity of sitting
up nights these days if a man wanted to keep out of the poorhouse.

And at least this young man did not look like an idler or a wastrel. No
man could have so clear a skin and be so well-groomed at six in the
morning if he drank or gambled. Alexander Groome had done both and she
knew the external seals.

"Is Aileen Lawton a friend of yours?" she asked sharply.

"I have met Miss Lawton at a number of dances but she has not done me
the honor to ask me to call."

"I think the more highly of you. Judge Lawton is an old friend of mine.
His wife, who was much younger than the Judge, was an intimate friend
of my daughter, Mrs. Abbott. Alexina and Aileen have grown up together.
I find it impossible to forbid her the house. But I disapprove of her
in every way. She paints her lips, smokes cigarettes, boasts that she
drinks cocktails, and uses the most abominable slang. I kept my
daughter in New York for two years as much to break up the intimacy as
to finish her education, but the moment we returned the intimacy was
renewed, and for my old friend's sake I have been forced to submit. He
worships that--that--really ill-conditioned child."

"Oh--Miss Lawton is a good sort, and--well--I suppose her position is
so strong that she feels she can do as she pleases. But she is all
right, and not so different--"

"Do you mean to tell me that you approve of girls--nice
girls--ladies--painting themselves, smoking, drinking cocktails?"

"I do not." His tones were emphatic and his good American gray eyes
wandered to the fresh innocent face of the girl who had captivated him
last night.

"I should hope not. You look like an exceptionally decent young man.
Have you had breakfast? Alexina, go and ask Maggie, if she has
recovered herself, to make another cup of coffee."



II


Alexina disappeared, repressing a desire to sing; and young Dwight,
receiving permission, seated himself on the grass at Mrs. Groome's
feet. He was lithe and graceful and as he threw back his head and
looked up at his hostess with his straight, honest glance the good
impression he had made was visibly enhanced. Mrs. Groome gave him the
warm and gracious smile that only her intimate friends and paid
inferiors had ever seen.

"The young men of to-day are a great disappointment to me," she
observed.

"Oh, they are all right, I guess. Most of the men that go about have
rich fathers--or near-rich ones. I wish I had one myself."

"And you would be as dissipated as the rest, I presume."

"No, I have no inclinations that way. But a man gets a better start in
life. And a man's a nonentity without money."

"Not if he has family."

"My family is good--in Utica. But that is of no use to me here."

"But your family _is_ good?"

"Oh, yes, it goes 'way back. There is a family mansion in Utica that is
over two hundred years old. But when the business district swamped that
part of the old town it was sold, and what it brought was divided among
six. My father came out here but did not make much of a success of
himself, so that he and my mother might as well have been on the Fiji
Islands for all the notice society took of them."

He spoke with some bitterness, and Mrs. Groome, to whom dwelling beyond
the outer gates of San Francisco's elect was the ultimate tragedy,
responded sympathetically.

"Society here is not what it used to be, and no doubt is only too glad
to welcome presentable young men. I infer that you have not found it
difficult."

"Oh, I dance well, and my employer's son, Bob Cheever, took me in. But
I'm only tolerated. I don't count."

The old lady looked at him keenly. "You are ambitious?"

He threw back his head. "Well, yes, I am, Mrs. Groome. As far as
society goes it is a matter of self-respect. I feel that I have the
right to go in the best society anywhere--that I am as good as anybody
when it comes to blood. And I'd like to get to the top in every way. I
don't mean that I would or could do the least thing dishonest to get
there, as so many men have done, but--well, I see no crime in being
ambitious and using every chance to get to the top. I'd like not only
to be one of the rich and important men of San Francisco, but to take a
part in the big civic movements."

Mrs. Groome was charmed. She was by no means an impulsive woman, but
she had suddenly realized her age, and if she must soon leave her
youngest child, who, heaven knew, needed a guardian, this young man
might be a son-in-law sent direct from heaven--via the earthquake. If
he had real ability the influential men she knew would see that he had
a proper start. But she had no intention of committing herself.

"And what do you think of what is now called San Francisco society?"
she demanded.

He was quite aware of Mrs. Groome's attitude. Who in San Francisco was
not? It was one of the standing jokes, although few of the younger or
newer set had ever heard of her until her naughty little daughter
danced upon the scene.

"Oh, it is mixed, of course. There are many houses where I do not care
to go. But, well, after all, the rich people are rather simple for all
their luxury, and as for the old families there are no more real
aristocrats in England itself."

Mrs. Groome was still more charmed. "But you were at Mrs. Hofer's last
night. I never heard of her before."

"Her husband is one of the most important of the younger men. His
father made a fortune in lumber and sent his son to Yale and all the
rest of it. He is really a gentleman--it only takes one generation out
here--and at present he's bent upon delivering the city from this
abominable ring of grafters ... There is no water to put out the fires
because the City Administration pocketed the money appropriated for a
new system; the pipes leading from Spring Valley were broken by the
earthquake."

"And who was she?"

Mrs. Groome asked this question with an inimitable inflection inherited
from her mother and grandmother, both of whom had been guardians of San
Francisco society in their day. The accent was on the "who." Bob
Cheever, whose grandmother had asked or answered the same question in
dark old double parlors filled with black walnut and carved oak, would
have muttered, "Oh, hell!" but Mr. Dwight replied sympathetically:
"Something very common, I believe-south of Market Street. But her
father was very clever, rose to be a foreman of the iron works, and
finally went into business and prospered in a small way. He sent his
daughter to Europe to be educated ... and even you could hardly tell
her from the real thing."

"And you go down to Burlingame, I suppose! That is a very nest of these
new people, and I am told they spend their time drinking and gambling."

He set his large rather hard lips. "No, I have never been asked down to
Burlingame-nor down the Peninsula anywhere. You see, I am only asked
out in town because an unmarried dancing man is always welcome if there
is nothing wrong with his manners. To be asked for intimate week-ends
is another matter. But I don't fancy Burlingame is half as bad as it is
represented to be. They go in tremendously for sport, you know, and
that is healthy and takes up a good deal of time. After all when people
are very rich and have more leisure than they know what to do with--"

"Many of the old set in Alta, San Mateo, Atherton and Menlo Park have
wealth and leisure-not vulgar fortunes, but enough-and for the most
part they live quite as they did in the old days."

His eyes lit up. "Ah, San Mateo, Alta, Atherton, Menlo Park. There you
have a real landed aristocracy. The Burlingame set must realize that
they would be nobodies for all their wealth if they could not call at
all those old communities down the Peninsula."

"Not so very many of them do. But I see you have no false values. You.
must go down with us some Sunday to Alta. I am sure you would like my
oldest daughter. She is very smart, as they call it now, but distinctly
of the old régime."

"There is nothing I should like better. Thank you so much." And there
was no doubting the sincerity of his voice, a rather deep and manly
voice which harmonized with the admirable mold of his ancestors.



III


Alexina appeared. "Breakfast is ready for all of us," she announced.
"We cooked it on the old stove in the woodhouse. I helped, for Maggie
is a wreck. Martha has swept the plaster out of the dining-room. Come
along. I'm starved."

Young Dwight sprang to his feet and stood over Mrs. Groome with his
charming deferential manner, but he had far too much tact to offer
assistance as she rose heavily from her chair.

"Are you really going to give me breakfast? I am sure I could not get
any elsewhere."

"We are only too happy. Your coming has been a real God-send. Will you
give me your arm? This morning--not the earthquake but those dreadful
fires--has quite upset me."

He escorted her into the dark old house with glowing eyes. He had seen
so little of the world that he was still very young at thirty and his
nature was sanguine, but he had never dared to dream of even difficult
access to this most exclusive home in San Francisco. Its gloom, its
tastelessness, relieved only by the splendid Italian pieces, but served
to accentuate its aristocratic aloofness from those superb but too
recently furnished mansions of which he knew so little outside of their
ballrooms.

And he was breakfasting with the sequestered Mrs. Groome and the
loveliest girl he had ever seen, at seven o 'clock in the morning.

He looked about eagerly as they entered the dining-room.. It was long
and narrow with a bow window at the end. The furniture was black
walnut; two immense sideboards were built into the walls. It looked
Ballinger, and it was.

It was heavily paneled; the walls above were tinted a pale buff and set
with cracked oil paintings of men in the uniforms of several
generations. The ceiling was frescoed with fish and fowl. There had
been a massive bronze chandelier over the table. It now lay on the
floor, but as James had turned off the gas in the meter while the
earthquake was still in progress the air of the large sunny room was
untainted, and the windows were open.

The breakfast was smoked but not uneatable and the strong coffee raised
even Mrs. Groome's wavering spirits. They were all talking gayly when
James entered abruptly. He was very pale.

"City's doomed, ma'am. Thirty fires broke out simultaneous, and the
wind blowing from the southeast. A chimney fell on the fire-chief's bed
and he can't live. People runnin' round like their heads was cut off
and thousands pouring out of the city--over to Oakland and Berkeley.
Lootin' was awful and General Funston has ordered out the troops. Pipes
broken and not a drop of water. They're goin' to dynamite, but only the
fire-chief knew how. Everybody says the whole city'll go, Doomed,
that's what it is. Better let me tell Mike to harness up and drive you
down to San Mateo."

Mrs. Groome had also turned pale, but she cut a piece of bacon with
resolution in every finger of her large-veined hands.

"I do not believe it, and I shall not run--like those people south of
Market Street. I shall stay until the last minute at all events. The
roads at least cannot burn."

"This house ought to be safe enough, ma 'am, standin' quite alone on
this hill as it does; but it's a question of food. We never keep much
of anything in the house, beyond what's needed for the week, and the
California Market's right in the fire zone. And the smoke will be
something terrible when the fire gets closer."

"I shall stay in my own house. There are grocery stores and butcher
shops in Fillmore Street. Go and buy all you can." She handed him a
bunch of keys. "You will find money in my escritoire. Tell the maids to
fill the bathtubs while there is any water left in the mains. You may
go if you are frightened, but I stay here."

"Very well, and you needn't have said that, ma'am. I've been in this
family, man and boy, Ballinger and Groome, for fifty-two years, and you
know I'd never desert you. But no doubt those hussies in the kitchen
will, with a lot of others. A lot of stoves have already been set up in
the streets out here and ladies are cookin' their own breakfasts."

"Forgive me, James. I know you will never leave me. And if the others
do we shall get along. Miss Alexina is not a bad cook." And she
heroically swallowed the bacon.



IV


James departed and she turned to Dwight, who was on his feet.

"You are not going?"

"I think I must, Mrs. Groome. There may be something I can do down
there. All able-bodied men will be needed, I fancy."

"But you'll come back and see us?" cried Alexina.

"Indeed I will. I'll report regularly."

He thanked Mrs. Groome for her hospitality and she invited him to take
pot luck with her at dinner time. After he had gone Alexina exclaimed
rapturously:

"Oh, you do like him, don't you, mommy dear?"

And Mrs. Groome was pleased to reply, "He has perfect manners and
certainly has the right ideas about things. I could do no less than ask
him to dinner if he is going to take the trouble to bring us the news."




CHAPTER IV



I


That was a unique and vivid day for young Alexina Groome, whose
disposition was to look upon life as drama and asked only that it shift
its scenes often and be consistently entertaining and picturesque.

Never, so James told her, since her Grandmother Ballinger's reign, had
there been such life and movement in the old house. All Mrs. Groome's
intimate friends and many of Alexina's came to it, some to make kindly
inquiries, others to beg them to leave the city, many to gossip and
exchange experiences of that fateful morning; a few from Rincon Hill
and the old ladies' fashionable boarding-house district to claim
shelter until they could make their way to relatives out of town.

Mrs. Groome welcomed her friends not only with the more spontaneous
hospitality of an older time but in that spirit of brotherhood that
every disaster seems to release, however temporarily. Brotherhood is
unquestionably an instinct of the soul, an inheritance from that
sunrise era when mutual interdependence was as imperative as it was
automatic. The complexities of civilization have overlaid it, and
almost but not wholly replaced it by national and individual
selfishness. But the world as yet is only about one-third civilized.
Centuries hence a unified civilization may complete the circle, but
human nature and progress must act and react a thousand times before
the earthly millenium; and it cannot be hastened by dreamers and
fanatics.

All Mrs. Groome's spare rooms were placed at the service of her
friends, and cots were bought in the humble Fillmore Street shops and
put up in the billiard room, the double parlors, the library and the
upper hall. Some forty people would sleep under the old Ballinger roof
that night--dynamite permitting. Mrs. Groome was firm in her
determination not to flee, and as James and Mike were there to watch,
she had graciously given a number of the gloomy refugees from the lower
regions permission to camp in the outhouses and grounds.



II


Alexina spent the greater part of the day with Aileen Lawton, Olive
Bascom, and Sibyl Thorndyke, out of doors, fascinated by the spectacle
of the burning city.

The valley beyond Market Street, and the lower business district, were
a rolling mass of smoke parting about pillars of fire, shot with a
million glittering sparks when a great building was dynamited. All the
windows in those sections of the city as yet beyond the path of the
fire were open, for although closed windows might have shut out the
torrid atmosphere, the explosions would have shattered them.

"Oh, dear," sighed Olive Bascom, "there goes my building. The smoke
lifted for a moment and I saw the flames spouting out of the windows. A
cool million and uninsured. We thought Class A buildings were safe from
any sort of fire."

"Heavens!" exclaimed Alexina naïvely, "I wish I had a million-dollar
building down in that furnace. It must be a great sensation to watch a
million dollars go up in sparks."

"I hope your mother hasn't any buildings down in the business
district," said Aileen anxiously. "I've heard dad talk about her ground
rents. She'll get those again soon enough. I fancy the old tradition
survives in this town and they'll begin to draw the plans for the new
city before the fire is out. It used to burn down regularly in the
fifties, dad says."

"I don't fancy we have much of anything," said Alexina cheerfully. "I
think mother has only a life interest in a part of father's estate, and
I heard her tell Maria once that she intended to leave me all she had
of her own, this place and a few thousand a year in bonds and some
flats that are probably burning up right now. I gathered from the
conversation that father didn't have much left when he died and that it
was understood mother was to look out for me. I believe he gave a lot
to the others when he was wealthy."

"Good Lord!" Aileen sighed heavily. "It won't pay your dressmakers'
bills, what with taxes and all. I won't be much better off. We'll have
to marry Rex Roberts or Bob Cheever or Frank Bascom--unless he's going
up in smoke too, Olive dear. But there are a few others."

Alexina shook her head. Her color could not rise higher for her face
was crimson from the heat; like the others she had a wet handkerchief
on her head. "There is not a grain of romance in one of them," she
announced. "Curious that the sons of the rich nearly always have round
faces, no particular features, and a tendency to bulge. I intend to
have a romance--old style--good old style--before the vogue of the
middle-class realists. There's nothing in life but youth and you only
have it once. I'm going to have a romance that means falling wildly,
unreasonably, uncalculatingly in love."

"You anticipate my adjectives," said Aileen drily. "Although not all.
But let that pass. I'd like to know where you expect to find the
opposite lead, as they say on the stage. Our men are not such a bad
sort, even the richest--with a few exceptions, of course. They may hit
it up at week-ends, generally at the country clubs, but they're better
than the last generation because their fathers have more sense. I'll
bet they're all down there now fighting the fire with the vim of their
grandfathers.... But romantic! Good Lord! I'll marry one of them all
right and glad of the chance--after I've had my fling. I'm in no hurry.
I'd have outgrown my illusions in any case by that time, only Nature
did the trick by not giving me any."

"Don't you believe there isn't a man in all San Francisco able to
inspire romance." If Alexina could not blush her dark gray eyes could
sparkle and melt. "All the men we meet don't belong to that rich group."

"Bunch, darling. Where--will you give us the pointer?--are to be found
the romantic knights of San Francisco? 'Frisco as those tiresome
Eastern people call it. Makes me sick to think that they are even now
pitying 'poor 'Frisco.' Well?--I could beat my brains and not call one
to mind."

"Oh!"

"What does that mean, Alex Groome? When you roll up your eyes like that
you look like a love-sick tomato."

"Mortimer Dwight was most devoted last night," said Sibyl Thorndyke.
"She danced with him at least eight times."

"You must have sat out alone to know what I was doing," Alexina began
hotly, but Aileen sprang at her and gripped her shoulders.

"Don't tell me that you are interested in that cheap skate. Alexina
Groome! You!"

"He's not a cheap skate. I despise your cheap slang."

"He's a rank nobody."

"You mean he isn't rich. Or his family didn't belong. What do you
suppose I care? I'm not a snob."

"He is. A climbing, ingenuous, empty-headed snob."

"You are a snob. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"I've a right to be a snob if I choose, and he hasn't. My snobbery is
the right sort: the 'I will maintain' kind. He'd give all the hair on
his head to have the right to that sort of snobbery. His is" (she
chanted in a high light maddening voice): "Oh, God, let me climb. Yank
me up into the paradise of San Francisco society. Burlingame, Alta,
Menlo Park, Atherton, Belvidere, San Rafael. Oh, God, it's awful to be
a nobody, not to be in the same class with these rich fellers, not to
belong to the Pacific-Union Club, not to have polo ponies, not to
belong to smart golf clubs, to the Burlingame Club. Not to get clothes
from New York and London--"

"You keep quiet," shrieked Alexina, who with difficulty refrained from
substituting: "You shut up." She flung off Aileen's hands. "What do you
know about him? He doesn't like you."

"Never had a chance to find out."

"What can you know about him, then?"

"Think I'm blind? Think I'm deaf? Don't I know everything that goes on
in this town? Isn't sizing-up my long suit? And he's as dull as--as a
fish without salt. I sat next to him at a dinner, and all he could talk
about was the people he'd met--our sort, of course. And he was dull
even at that. He's all manners and bluff--"

"You couldn't draw him out. He talked to me."

"What about? I'm really interested to know. Everybody says the same
thing. They fall for his dancing and manners, and--well, yes--I 'll
admit it--for his looks. He even looks like a gentleman. But all the
girls say he bores 'em stiff. They have to talk their heads off. What
did he say to you that was so frantically interesting?"

"Well, of course--we danced most of the time."

"That's just it. He's inherited the shell of some able old ancestor and
not a bit of the skull furniture. Nature often plays tricks like that.
But I could forgive him for being dull if he weren't such a damn snob."

"You shan't call him names. If he wants to be one of us, and life was
so unkind as to--to--well, birth him on the outside, I'm sure that's no
crime."

"Snobbery," said Miss Thorndyke, who was intellectual at the moment and
cultivating the phrase, "is merely a rather ingenuous form of
aspiration. I can't see that it varies except in kind from other forms
of ambition. And without ambition there would be no progress."

"Oh, can it," sneered Judge Lawton's daughter. "You're all wrong,
anyhow. Snobbery leads to the rocks much oftener than to high
achievement. I've heard dad say so, and you won't venture to assert
that _he_ doesn't know. It bears about the same relation to progress
that grafting does to legitimate profits. Anyhow, it makes me sick, and
I'm not going to have Alex falling in love with a poor fish--"

"Fish?" Alexina's voice rose above a fresh detonation, "You dare--and
you think I'm going to ask you whom I shall fall in love with? Fish?
What do you call those other shrimps who don't think of anything but
drinking and sport, whether they attend to business or not?--their
fathers make them, anyhow. And you want to marry one of them! They're
fish, if you like."

The two girls were glaring at each other. Gray eyes were blazing, green
eyes snapping. Two sets of white even teeth were bared. They looked
like a couple of belligerent puppies. Another moment and they would
have forgotten the sacred traditions of their class and flown at each
other's hair. But Miss Bascom interposed. Even the loss of her
uninsured million did not ruffle her, for she had another in Government
and railroad bonds, and full confidence in her brother, who was an
admirable business man, and not in the least dissipated.

"Come, come," she said. "It's much too hot to fight. Dwight is not good
enough for Alex--from a worldly point of view, I mean," as Alexina made
a movement in her direction. "We should none of us marry out of our
class. It never works, somehow. But Mr. Dwight is really quite all
right otherwise. I like him very much, Alex darling, and I don't mind
his being an outsider in the least--so long as he doesn't try to marry
one of us. He's _too_ good-looking, and his heels are fairly inspired.
No one questions the fact that he is an honorable and worthy young man,
working like a real man to earn his living. It isn't at all as if he
were an adventurer. He has never struck me as being more of a snob than
most people, and I don't see why I haven't thought to ask him down to
San Mateo for a week-end."

"You'll certainly have a friend for life if you do," said Aileen
satirically. "Fall in love with him yourself if you choose. You can
afford it."

"No fear. I've made up my mind. I'm going to marry a French marquis."

"What?" Even Alexina forgot Mortimer Dwight. "Who is he? Where did you
meet him?"

"I haven't met him yet. But I shall. I'm going to Paris next winter to
visit my aunt, and I'll find one. You get anything in this world you go
for hard enough. To be a French marquise is the most romantic thing in
the world."

"Why not Elton Gwynne? It's an open secret that he's an English
marquis. Or that young Gathbroke Lady Victoria brought last night?"

"He's a younger son, and he never looked at any one but Alex. And
Isabel Otis has preëmpted Mr. Gwynne. And I adore France and don't care
about England."

"Well, that is romantic if you like!" cried Aileen, her green eyes
dancing. "You have my best wishes. Doesn't it make your Geary Street
knight look cheap--he boards somewhere down on Geary Street."

"No, it doesn't! And I'm a good American. French marquis, indeed! Mr.
Dwight comes of the best old American stock from New York. He told
mother so, I'd spit on any old decadent European title."

"I wish your mother could hear you. So--he's been getting round her has
he? Where on earth did he meet her?"

Alexina, with sulky triumph, reported Mr. Dwight's early visit and the
favorable impression he had made.

Aileen groaned. "That's just the one thing she would fall for in a rank
outsider--superlative manners. His being poor is rather in his favor.
I'll put a flea in her ear--"

"You dare!"

Aileen lifted her shoulders. "Well, as a matter of fact I can't.
Tattling just isn't in my line. But if I can queer him with you I will."

"I won't talk about him any more." Alexina drew herself up with immense
dignity. She had the advantage of Aileen not only in inches but in a
natural repose of manner. The eminent Judge Lawton's only child, upon
whom, possibly, he may have lavished too much education, had a thin
nervous little body that was seldom in repose, and her face, with its
keen irregular features and brilliant green eyes, shifted its surface
impressions as rapidly as a cinematograph. Olive Bascom had soft blue
eyes and abundant brown hair, and Sibyl Thorndyke had learned to hold
her long black eyes half closed, and had the black hair and rich
complexion of a Creole great-grandmother. Alexina was admittedly the
"beauty of the bunch." Nevertheless, Miss Lawton had informed her
doting parent before this, her first season, was half over, that she
was _vivid_ enough to hold her own with the best of them. The boys said
she was a live wire and she preferred that high specialization to the
tameness of mere beauty.



IV


Said Alexina: "Sibyl, what are you going to do with your young life?
Shall you marry an English duke or a New York millionaire?"

But Miss Thorndyke smiled mysteriously. She was not as frank as the
other girls, although by no means as opaque as she imagined.

Aileen laughed. "Oh, don't ask her. Doubt if she knows. To-day she's
all for being intellectual and reading those damn dull Russian
novelists. To-morrow she may be setting up as an odalisque. It would
suit her style better."

Miss Thorndyke's face was also crimson from the heat, but she would not
have flushed had it been the day before. She was not subject to sudden
reflexes.

"Your satire is always a bit clumsy, dear," she said sweetly. "The
odalisque is not your rôle at all events."

"I don't go in for rôles."

And the four girls wrangled and dreamed and planned, while a city burnt
beneath them; some three hundred million dollars flamed out, lives were
ruined, exterminated, altered; and Labor sat on the hills and smiled
cynically at the tremendous impetus the earth had handed them on that
morning of April eighteenth, nineteen hundred and six.

They were too young to know or to care. When the imagination is trying
its wings it is undismayed even by a world at war.




CHAPTER V



I


That night Alexina knew that romance had surely come to her. She shared
her room with three old ladies who slept fitfully between blasts of
dynamite. But she sat at the window with no desire for oblivion.

On the lawn paced a young man with a rifle in the crook of his arm. He
was tall and young and very gallant of bearing; no less a person than
Mortimer Dwight, who had been sworn in that morning as a member of the
Citizens' Patrol, and at his own request detailed to keep watch over
the house of Mrs. Groome.

He had not been able to pay his promised visits during the day but had
arrived at seven o'clock, dining beside Mrs. Abbott, and surrounded by
old ladies whose names were as historic as Mrs. Groome's. The cook had
deserted after the second heavy shock, and, with her wardrobe in a
pillow case, had tramped to the farthest confines of the Presidio. It
was not fear alone that induced her flight. There was a rumor that the
Government would feed the city, and why should not a hard-working woman
enjoy a month or two of sheer idleness? Let the quality cook for
themselves. It would do them good.

James and the housemaid had cooked the dinner, and Alexina and her
friends waited on the table. Then the girls, to Alexina's relief, went
home to inquire after their families, and she accompanied Mr. Dwight
while he explored every corner of the grounds to make sure that no
potential thieves lurked in the heavy shadows cast by the trees.

He had been very alert and thorough and Alexina admired him consumedly.
There was no question but that he was one of those men--Aileen called
it the one hundred per cent male--upon whose clear brain and strong arm
a woman might depend even in the midst of an infuriated mob. He had an
opportunity that comes to few aspiring young men born into the world's
unblest millions, and if he made the most of it he was equally assured
that he was acting in strict accord with the instincts and
characteristics that had descended upon him by the grace of God.



II


There was no physical cowardice in him; and if he would have preferred
a life of ease and splendor, he had no illusions regarding the amount
of "hustling" necessary to carry him to the goal of his desires and
ambitions--unless he made a lucky strike. He played the stock market in
a small way and made a few hundred dollars now and then.

He would have been glad to marry a wealthy girl, Olive Bascom, by
preference, for he had an inner urge to the short cut, but he had found
these spoiled daughters of San Francisco unresponsive ... and then,
suddenly, he had fallen in love with Alexina Groome.

His past was green and prophylactic. He was moral both by inheritance
and necessity, and his parents, people of fair intelligence, if rather
ineffective, stern principles, and good old average ideals, had taken
their responsibilities toward their two children very seriously. People
who talked with young Dwight might not find him resourceful in
conversation but they were deeply impressed with his manners and
principles. The younger men, with the exception of Bob Cheever, who
respected his capacity for work, did not take to him; principally, no
doubt, he reflected with some bitterness, because he was not "their
sort."

He never admitted to himself that he was a snob, for something deep and
still unfaced in his consciousness, bade him see as little fault in
himself as possible, forbade him to admit the contingency of a failure,
impelled him to call such weaknesses as the fortunate condemned by some
one of those interchangeable terms with which the lexicons are so
generous.

But if he would not face the word snob he told himself proudly that he
was ambitious; and why should he not aspire to the best society? Was he
not entitled to it by birth? His family may not have been prominent to
excess in Utica, but it was indisputably "old." However, he assured
himself that the chief reason for his determination to mingle with the
social elect of San Francisco was not so much a tribute to his
ancestors, or even the insistence of youth for the decent pleasures of
that brief period, but because of the opportunities to make those
friends indispensable to every young man forced to cut his own way
through life. Even if his good conscience had compelled him to admit
that he was a snob he would have reminded it there was no harm in
snobbery anyway. It was the most amiable of the vices. But he thought
too well of himself for any such admission, and his mind had not been
trained to fish, even, in shallow waters.

Nor did he admit that if the lovely Miss Groome had been a stenographer
he would not have looked at her. He would indeed have turned his face
resolutely in the other direction if she had happened to sit in his
employer's office. Fate forbade him a marriage of that sort, and
dalliance with an inferior was forbidden both by his morals and his
social integrity.

But that Alexina Groome should be beautiful, as exaltedly born as only
a San Franciscan of the old stock might be, with a determinate income,
however modest, with a background of friendly males, as substantial
financially as socially, who would be sure to give a new member of the
family a leg-up (he liked the atmosphere and flavor of the lighter
English novels), and, above all, responsive, seemed to him a direct
reward for the circumspect life he had lived and his fidelity to his
chosen upward path.



III


He was free to fall in love as profoundly as was in him, and during
that early hour of the agitated night, with that pit of hell roaring
below to the steady undertone of a thousand tramping feet, he felt,
despite the fact that all business was moribund for the present and his
savings were in the hot vaults of a dynamited bank, that he was a
supremely fortunate young man.

Moreover, this disaster furnished a steady topic for conversation. He
was aware that he contributed little froth and less substance to a
dinner table, that, in short, he did not keep up his end. Although he
assured himself that small talk was beneath a man of serious purpose,
and that no one could acquire it anyhow in society unless addicted to
sport, still there had been times when he was painfully aware that a
dinner partner or some bright charming creature whose invitation to
call he had accepted, looked politely bored or chattered desperately to
cover the silences into which he abruptly relapsed; when, "for the life
of him he had not been able to think of a thing to say."

Then, briefly, he had felt a bitter rebellion at fate for having denied
him the gift of a lively and supple mind, as well as those numberless
worldly benefits lavished on men far less deserving than he.

He felt dull and depressed after such revelations and sometimes
considered attending evening lectures at the University of California
with his sister. But for this form of mental exertion he had no taste,
keenly as he applied himself to his work during the hours of business;
and he assured himself that such knowledge would do him no good anyway.
It did not seem to be prevalent in society. If he had been a brilliant
hand at bridge or poker, the inner fortifications of society would have
gone down before him, but his courage did not run to card gambling with
wealthy idlers who set their own pace. On the stock market he could
step warily and no one the wiser. It would have horrified him to be
called a piker, for his instincts were really lavish, and the
economical habit an achievement in which he took a resentful pride.



IV


On this evening he had talked almost incessantly to Alexina, and she,
in the vocabulary of her years and set, had thought him frantically
interesting as he described the immediate command of the city assumed
by General Funston, the efforts of the Committee of Fifty, formed early
that morning by leading citizens, to help preserve order and to give
assistance to the refugees; of rich young men, and middle-aged citizens
who had not spent an afternoon away from their club window for ten
years, carrying dynamite in their cars through the very flames; of wild
and terrible episodes he had witnessed or heard of during the day.

His brain was hot from the mental and physical atmosphere of the
perishing city, the unique excitement of the day: when he had felt as
if snatched from his quiet pasture by the roots; and by the
extraordinary good fortune that had delivered this perfect girl and her
formidable parent almost into his hands. Under his sternly controlled
exterior his spirits sang wildly that his luck had turned, and dazzling
visions of swift success and fulfillment of all ambitions snapped on
and off in his stimulated brain.

Alexina thought him not only immoderately fascinating in his appeal to
her own imperious youth, but the most interesting life partner that a
romantic maiden with secret intellectual promptings could demand. Her
brilliant long eyes melted and flashed, her soft unformed mouth wore a
constant alluring smile.

A declaration trembled on his tongue, but he felt that he would be
taking an unfair advantage and restrained himself. Besides, he wished
to win Mrs. Groome completely to his side, to say nothing of the still
more alarming because more worldly Mrs. Abbott. _She_ was a snob, if
you like!



V


At nine o'clock, after he had given the inmates of the house and
outbuildings stern orders not to light a candle or lamp under any
circumstances--such was the emergency law--he bade Alexina a gallant
good-night, and betook himself to the lawn within the grove of sighing
eucalyptus trees, to pace up and down, his rifle in his arm, his eyes
alert, and quite aware of the admiring young princess at the casement
above.

He did his work very thoroughly, visiting outhouses at intervals and
sharply inspecting the weary occupants, as well as the prostrate forms
under the trees. They were all far too tired and apprehensive to dream
of breaking into the house that had given them hospitality, even had
they been villains, which they were not.

But they did not resent his inspection; rather they felt a sense of
security in this watching manly figure with the gun, for they were
rather afraid of villains themselves: it was reported that many looters
had been stood against hissing walls and shot by the stern orders of
General Punston. They asked their more immediate protector questions as
to the progress of the fire, which he answered curtly, as befitted his
office.




CHAPTER VI



I


MRS. ABBOTT entered Alexina's room and caught her hanging out of the
window. She had motored up to the city during the afternoon, and, after
a vain attempt to persuade her mother to go down at once to Alta, had
concluded to remain over night. The spectacle was the most horrifyingly
interesting she had ever witnessed in her temperate life, and her
self-denying Aunt Clara was in charge of the children. Her husband had
driven himself to town as soon as he heard of the fire and been sworn
in a member of the Committee of Fifty.

"Darling," she said firmly to the sister who was little older than her
first-born, "I want to have a talk with you. Come into papa's old
dressing-room. I had a cot put there, and as there is no room for
another I am quite alone."

Alexina followed with lagging feet. She had always given her elder
sister the same surface obedience that she gave her mother. It "saved
trouble." But life had changed so since morning that she was in no mood
to keep up the rôle of "little sister," sweet and malleable and
innocent as a Ballinger-Groome at the age of eighteen should be.



II


She dropped on the floor and embraced her knees with her arms. Mrs.
Abbott seated herself in as dignified an attitude as was possible on
the edge of the cot. Even the rocking-chairs had been taken down to the
dining-room.

"Well?" queried Alexina, pretending to stifle a yawn. "What is it? I am
too sleepy to think."

"Sleepy? You looked sleepy with your eyes like saucers watching that
young man."

"Everybody that can is watching the fire--"

"Don't quibble, Alexina. You are naturally a truthful child. Do you
mean to tell me you were not watching Mr. Dwight?"

"Well, if I say yes, it is not because I care a hang about living up to
my reputation, but because I don't care whether you know it or not."

"That is very naughty--"

"Stop talking to me as if I were a child."

"You are excited, darling, and no wonder."

Maria Abbott was in the process of raising a family and she did it with
tact and firmness. Nature had done much to assist her in her several
difficult rôles. She was very tall straight and slender, with a haughty
little head, as perfect in shape as Alexina's, set well back on her
shoulders, and what had been known in her Grandmother Ballinger's day
as a cameo-profile. Her abundant fair hair added to the high calm of
her mien and it was always arranged in the prevailing fashion. On the
street she invariably wore the tailored suit, and her tailor was the
best in New York. She thought blouses in public indecent, and wore
shirtwaists of linen or silk with high collars, made by the same
master-hand. There was nothing masculine in her appearance, but she
prided herself upon being the best groomed woman even in that small
circle of her city that dressed as well as the fashionable women of New
York. At balls and receptions she wore gowns of an austere but
expensive simplicity, and as the simple jewels of her inheritance
looked pathetic beside the blazing necklaces and sunbursts (there were
only two or three tiaras in San Francisco) of those new people whom she
both deplored and envied, she wore none; and she was assured that the
lack added to the distinction of her appearance.

But although she felt it almost a religious duty to be smart,
determined as she was that the plutocracy should never, while she was
alive, push the aristocracy through, the wall and out of sight, she was
a strict conformer to the old tradition that had looked upon all arts
to enhance and preserve youth as the converse of respectable. Her once
delicate pink and white skin was wrinkled and weather-beaten, her nose
had never known powder; but even in the glare of the fire her skin
looked cool and pale, for the heat had not crimsoned her. Her blood was
rather thin and she prided herself upon the fact. She may have lost her
early beauty, but she looked the indubitable aristocrat, the lady born,
as her more naïve grandmothers would have phrased it.

It sufficed.



III


By those that did not have the privilege of her intimate acquaintance
she was called "stuck-up," "a snob," a mid-victorian who ought to dress
like her more consistent mother, "rather a fool, if the truth were
known, no doubt."

In reality she was a tender-hearted and anxious mother, daughter, and
sister, and an impeccable wife, if a somewhat monotonous one. At all
events her husband never found fault with her in public or private. He
had his reasons. To the friends of her youth and to all members of her
own old set, she was intensely loyal; and although she had a cold
contempt for the institution of divorce, if one of that select band
strayed into it, no matter at which end, her loyalty rose triumphant
above her social code, and she was not afraid to express it publicly.

Toward Alexina she felt less a sister than a second mother, and gave
her freely of her abundant maternal reservoir. That "little sister" had
at times sulked under this proud determination to assist in the
bringing-up of the last of the Ballinger-Groomes, did not discourage
her. She might be soft in her affections but she never swerved from her
duty as she saw it. Alexina was a darling wayward child, who only
needed a firm hand to guide her along that proud secluded old avenue of
the city's elect, until she had ambled safely to established
respectability and power.

She had been alarmed at one time at certain symptoms of cleverness she
noticed in the child, and at certain enthusiastic remarks in the
letters of Ballinger Groome, with whose family Alexina had spent her
vacations during her two years in New York at school. But there had
been no evidence of anything but a young girl's natural love of
pleasure since her début in society, and she was quite unaware of
Alexina's wicked divagations. She had spent the winter in Santa
Barbara, for the benefit of her oldest, boy, whose lungs were delicate,
and, like her mother, never deigned to read the society columns of the
newspapers. Her reason, however, was her own. In spite of her blood,
her indisputable position, her style, she cut but a small figure in
those columns. She was not rich enough to vie with those who
entertained constantly, and was merely set down as one of many guests.
The fact induced a slight bitterness.



IV


She began tactfully. "I like this young Mr. Dwight very much, and shall
ask him down, as mother desires it. But I hope, darling, that you will
follow my example and not marry until you have had four years of
society, in other words have seen something of the world--"

"California is not the world."

"Society, in other words human nature, is everywhere much alike. As you
know, I spent a year in England when I was a young lady, and was
presented at court--by Lady Barnstable, who was Lee Tarlton, one of us.
It was merely San Francisco on a large scale, with titles, and greater
and older houses and parks, and more jewels, and more arrogance, and
everything much grander, of course. And they talked politics a great
deal, which bored me as I am sure they would bore you. The beauty of
our society is its simplicity and lack of arrogance--consciousness of
birth or of wealth. Even the more recent members of society, who owe
their position to their fortunes, have a simplicity and kindness quite
unknown in New York. Eastern people always remark it. And yet, owing to
their constant visits to the East and to Europe, they know all of the
world there is to know."

"So do the young men, I suppose! I never heard of their doing much
traveling--"

"I should call them remarkably sophisticated young men. But the point
is, darling, that if you wait as long as I did you will discover that
the men who attract a girl in her first season would bore her to
extinction in her fourth."

"You mean after I've had all the bloom rubbed off, and men are
forgetting to ask me to dance. Then I'll be much more likely to take
what I can get. I want to marry with all the bloom on and all my
illusions fresh."

"But should you like to have them rubbed off by your husband? You've
heard the old adage: 'marry in haste and repent--'"

"I've been brought up on adages. They are called bromides now. As for
illusions, everybody says they don't last anyway. I'd rather have them
dispelled after a long wonderful honeymoon by a husband than by a lot
of flirtations in a conservatory and in dark corners--"

"Good heavens! Do you suppose that I flirted in a conservatory and in
dark corners?"

"I'll bet you didn't, but lots do. And in the haute noblesse, the
ancient aristocracy! I've seen 'em."

"It isn't possible that you--"

"Oh, no, I love to dance too much. But I'm not easily shocked. I 'll
tell you that right here. And I 'll tell you what I confessed to mother
this morning."



V


When she had finished Mrs. Abbott sat for a few moments petrified; but
she was thirty-eight, not sixty-five, and there was neither dismay nor
softening in her narrowed light blue eyes.

"But that is abominable! Abominable!"

And Alexina, who was prepared for a scolding, shrank a little, for it
was the first time that her doting sister had spoken to her with
severity.

"I don't care," she said stubbornly, and she set her soft lips until
they looked stern and hard.

"But you must care. You are a Groome."

"Oh, yes, and a Ballinger, and a Geary, and all the rest of it. But I'm
also going to annex another name of my own choosing. I'll marry whom I
damn please, and that is the end of it."

"Alexina Groome!" Mrs. Abbott arose in her wrath. "Cannot you see for
yourself what association with all these common people has done to you?
It's the influence--"

"Of two years in New York principally. The girls there are as hard as
nails--try to imitate the English. Ours are not a patch, not even
Aileen, although she does her best. But I hadn't finished--I even
powder my face." Alexina grinned up at her still rudderless sister.
"After mother is asleep and I am ready to slip out."

"I thought you were safe in New York under the eyes of Ballinger and
Geary, or rather of Mattie and Charlotte. They are such earnest good
women, so interested in charities--"

"Deadly. But you don't know the girls,"

"And I have told mother again and again that she should not permit you
to associate with Aileen Lawton."

"She can't help herself. Aileen is one of us. Besides, mother is
devoted to the Judge."

"But powder! None of us has ever put anything but clean cold water on
her face."

"You'd look a long sight better if you did. Cold cream, too. You
wouldn't have any wrinkles at your age, if you weren't so damn
respectable-aristocratic, you call it. It's just middle class. And as
out of date as speech without slang. As for me, I'd paint my lips as
Aileen does, only I don't like the taste, and they're too red, anyhow.
It's much smarter to make up than not to. Times change. You don't wear
hoopskirts because our magnificent Grandmother Ballinger did. You dress
as smartly as the Burlingame crowd. Why does your soul turn green at
make-up? All these people you look down upon because our families were
rich and important in the fifties are more up-to-date than you are,
although I will admit that none of them has the woman-of-the-world air
of the smartest New York women--not that terribly respectable inner set
in New York--Aunt Mattie's and Aunt Charlotte's--_that_ just revels in
looking mid-Victorian.... The newer people I've met here--their manners
are just as good as ours, if not better, for, as you said just now,
they don't put on airs. You do, darling. You don't know it, but you
would put an English duchess to the blush, when you suddenly remember
who you are--"

Mrs. Abbott had resumed her seat on the cot. "If you have finished
criticizing your elder sister, I should like to ask you a few
questions. Do you smoke and drink cocktails?"

"No, I don't. But I should if I liked them, and if they didn't make me
feel queer."

"You--you--" Mrs. Abbot's clear crisp voice sank to an agonized
whisper. For the first time she was really terrified. "Do you gamble?"

"Why, of course not. I have too much fun to think of anything so
stupid."

"Does Aileen Lawton gamble?"

"She just doesn't, and don't you insinuate such a thing."

"She has bad blood in her. Her mother--"

"I thought her mother was your best friend."

"She was. But she went to pieces, poor dear, and Judge Lawton wisely
sent her East. I can't tell you why. There are things you don't
understand."

"Oh, don't I? Don't you fool yourself."

Mrs. Abbott leaned back on the cot and pressed it hard with either hand.

"Alexina, I have never been as disturbed as I am at this moment. When
Sally and I were your age, we were beautifully innocent. If I thought
that Joan--"

"Oh, Joan'll get away from you. She's only fourteen now, but when she's
my age--well, I guess you and your old crowd are the last of the
Mohicans. I doubt if there'll even be any chaperons left. Joan may not
smoke nor drink. Who cares for 'vices,' anyhow? But you haven't got a
moat and drawbridge round Rincona, and she'll just get out and mix.
She'll float with the stream--and all streams lead to Burlingame."

"I have no fear about Joan," said Mrs. Abbott, with dignity. "Four
years are a long time. I shall sow seeds, and she is a born
Ballinger--I am dreadfully afraid that my dear father is coming out in
you. Even the boys are Ballingers--"



VI


"Tell me about father?" coaxed Alexina, who was repentant, now that the
excitement of the day had reached its climax in the baiting of her
admirable sister and was rapidly subsiding. "Mother let fall something
this morning; and once Aileen ... she began, but shut up like a clam.
Was he so very dreadful?"

"Well, since you know so much, he was what is called fast. Married men
of his position often were in his day--quite openly. Yesterday, I
should have hesitated--"

"Fire away. Don't mind me. Yes, I know what fast is. Lots of men are
to-day. Even members of the A. A."

"A. A.?"

"Ancient Aristocracy. The kind England and France would like to have."

"I'm ashamed of you. Have you no pride of blood? The best blood of the
South, to say nothing of--"

"I'm tickled to death. I just dote on being a Groome, plus Ballinger,
plus. And I'm not guying, neither. I'd hate like the mischief to be
second rate, no matter what I won later. It must be awful to have to
try to get to places that should be yours by divine right, as it were.
But all that's no reason for being a moss-back, a back number, for not
having any fun--to be glued to the ancestral rock like a lot of old
limpets.... And it should preserve us from being snobs," she added.

"Snobs?"

"The 'I will maintain' sort, as Aileen puts it."

"Don't quote that dreadful child to me. I haven't an atom of snobbery
in my composition. I reserve the right to know whom I please, and to
exclude from my house people to whom I cannot accustom myself. Why I
know quite a number of people at Burlingame. I dined there informally
last night."

"Yes, because it has the fascination for you that wine has for the
clergyman's son." Alexina once more yielded to temptation. "But the
only people you really know at Burlingame except Mrs. Hunter are those
of the old set, what you would call the pick of the bunch, if you were
one of us. They went there to live because they were tired of being
moss-backs. Why don't you follow their example and go the whole hog?
They--and their girls--have a ripping time."

"At least they have not picked up your vocabulary. I seldom see the
young people. And I have never been to the Club. I am told the women
drink and smoke quite openly on the verandah."

"You may bet your sweet life they do. They are honest, and quite as
sure of their position as you are. But tell me about father. How did
mother come to marry him? If he was such a naughty person I should
think she would have exercised the sound Ballinger instincts and thrown
him down."

"Mother met him in Washington. Grandfather Ballinger was senator at the
time--"

"From Virginia or California?"

"It is shocking that you do not know more of the family history. From
California, of course. He had great gifts and political aspirations,
and realized that there would be more opportunity in the new
state--particularly in such a famous one--than in his own where all the
men in public life seemed to have taken root--I remember his using that
expression. So, he came here with his bride, the beauty of Richmond--"

"Oh, Lord, I know all about her. Remember the flavor in my mother's
milk--"

"Well, you'd look like her if you had brown eyes and a white skin, and
if your mouth were smaller. And until you learn to stand up straight
you'll never have anything like her elegance of carriage. However....
Of course they had plenty of money--for those days. They had come to
Virginia in the days of Queen Elizabeth and received a large grant of
land--"

"Don't fancy I haven't heard _that_!"

"Grandfather had inherited the plantation--"

"Sold his slaves, I suppose, to come to California and realize his
ambitions. Funny, how ideals change!"

"His abilities were recognized as soon as lie arrived in the new
community, and our wonderful grandmother became at once one of that
small band of social leaders that founded San Francisco society: Mrs.
Hunt McLane, the Hathaways, Mrs. Don Pedro Earle, the Montgomerys, the
Gearys, the Talbots, the Belmonts, Mrs. Abbott, Tom's grandmother--"

"Never mind about them. I have them dished up occasionally by mother,
although she prefers to descant upon the immortal eighties, when she
was a leader herself and 'money wasn't everything.' We never had so
much of it anyhow. I know Grandfather Ballinger built this ramshackle
old house--"

Mrs. Abbott sat forward and drew herself up. She felt as if she were
talking to a stranger, as, indeed, she was.

"This house and its traditions are sacred--"

"I know it. Yon were telling me how mother came to marry a bad fast
man."

"He was not fast when she met him. It was at a ball in Washington. He
was a young congressman--he was wounded in his right arm during the
first year of the war and returned at once to California; of course he
had been one of the first to enlist. He was of a fine old family and by
no means poor. Of course in Washington he was asked to the best houses.
At that time he was very ambitious and absorbed in politics and the
advancement of California. Afterward he renounced Washington for
reasons I never clearly understood; although he told me once that
California was the only place for a man to live; and--well--I am afraid
he could do more as he pleased out here without criticism--from men, at
least. The standards--for men--were very low in those days. But when he
met mother--"

"Was mother ever very pretty?"

"She was handsome," replied Mrs. Abbott guardedly. "Of course she had
the freshness and roundness of youth. I am told she had a lovely color
and the brightest eyes. And she had a beautiful figure. She had several
proposals, but she chose father."

"And had the devil's own time with him. She let out that much this
morning."

"I am growing accustomed to your language." Once more Mrs. Abbott was
determined to be amiable and tactful. She realized that the child's
brain was seething with the excitements of the day, but was aghast at
the revelations it had recklessly tossed out, and admitted that the
problem of "handling her" could no longer be disposed of with home-made
generalities.

"Yes, mother did not have a bed of roses. Father was mayor at one time
and held various other public offices, and no one, at least, ever
accused him of civic corruptness. Quite the contrary. The city owes
more than one reform to his determination and ability.

"He even risked his life fighting the bosses and their political gangs,
for he was shot at twice. But he was very popular in his own class;
what men call a good fellow, and at that time there was quite a
brilliant group of disreputable women here; one could not help hearing
things, for the married women here have always been great gossips.
Well--you may as well know it--it may have the same effect on you that
it did on Ballinger and Geary, who are the most abstemious of men--he
drank and gambled and had too much to do with those unspeakable
women....

"Nevertheless, he made a great deal of money for a long time, and if he
hadn't gambled (not only in gambling houses and in private but in
stocks), he would have left a large fortune. As it is, poor darling,
you will only have this house and about six thousand a year. Father was
quite well off when Sally and I married and Ballinger and Geary went to
New York after marrying the Lyman girls, who were such belles out here
when they paid us a visit in the nineties. They had money of their own
and father gave the boys a hundred thousand each. He gave the same to
Sally and me when we married. But when you came along, or rather when
you were ten, and he died--well, he had run through nearly everything,
and had lost his grip. Mother got her share of the community property,
and of course she had this house and her share of the Ballinger
estate--not very much."



VII


"Why didn't mother keep father at home and make him behave himself?"

"Mother did everything a good woman could do."

"Maybe she was too good."

"You abominable child. A woman can't be too good."

"Perhaps not. But I fancy she can make a man think so. When he has
different tastes."

"Women are as they are born. My mother would not have condescended to
lower herself to the level of those creatures who fascinated my father."

"Well, I wouldn't, neither. I'd just light out and leave him. Why
didn't mother get a divorce?"

"A divorce? Why, she has never received any one in her house who has
been divorced. Neither have I except in one or two cases where very
dear friends had been forced by circumstances into the divorce court. I
didn't approve even then. People should wash their dirty linen at home."

"Time moves, as I remarked just now. Nothing would stop me; if, for
instance, I had been persuaded into marrying a member of the A. A. and
he was in the way of ruining my young life. You should be thankful if I
did decide to marry Mr. Dwight--mind, I don't say I care the tip of my
little finger for him. I barely know him. But if I did you would have
to admit that I was following the best Ballinger instincts, for he
doesn't drink, or dissipate in any way; and everybody says he works
hard and is as steady as--I was going to say as a judge, but I've been
told that all judges, in this town at least, are not as steady as you
think. Anyhow, he is. His family is as old as ours, even if it did have
reverses or something. And you can't deny that he is a gentleman, every
inch of him."

"I do not deny that he has a very good appearance indeed. But--well, he
was brought up in San Francisco and no one ever heard of his parents.
He admitted to me at the table that his father was only a clerk in a
broker's office. He is not one of us and that is the end of it."

"Why not make him one? Quite easy. And you ought to rejoice in what
power you have left."

She rose and stretched and yawned in a most unladylike fashion.

"I'm going to make a cup of coffee for our sentinel, and have a little
chat with him, chaperoned by the great bonfire. Don't think you can
stop me, for you can't. Heavens, what a noise that dynamite does make!
We shall have to shout. It will be more than proper. Good night,
darling."




CHAPTER VII



I


Gora Dwight with a quick turn of a strong and supple wrist flung a
folding chair up through the trap door of the roof. She followed with a
pitcher of water, opened the chair, and sat down.

It was the second day of the fire, which was now raging in the valleys
north of Market Street and up the hills. It was still some distance
from all but the lower end of Van Ness Avenue, the wide street that
divides the eastern and western sections of the city, as Market Street
divides the northern and southern, and her own home on Geary Street was
beyond Franklin and safe for the present. It was expected that the fire
would be halted by dynamiting the blocks east of the avenue, but as it
had already leapt across not far from Market Street and was running out
toward the Mission, Gora pinned her faith in nothing less than a change
of wind.

Life has many disparate schools. The one attended by Miss Gora Dwight
had taught her to hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and be
thankful if she escaped (to use the homely phrase; one rarely found
leisure for originality in this particular school) by the skin of her
teeth.

Gora fully expected to lose the house she sat on, and had packed what
few valuables she possessed in two large bags: the fine underclothes
she had made at odd moments, and a handsome set of toilet articles her
brother had given her on the Christmas before last. He had had a raise
of salary and her experiment with lodgers had proved even more
successful than she had dared to hope. On the following Christmas he
had given her a large book with a fancy binding (which she had
exchanged for something she could read). After satisfying the
requirements of a wardrobe suitable for the world of fashion,
supplemented by the usual toll of flowers and bon-bons, he had little
surplus for domestic presents.

Gora's craving for drama was far deeper and more significant than young
Alexina Groome's, and she determined to watch until the last moment the
terrific spectacle of the burning city. The wind had carried the smoke
upward for a mile or more and pillars of fire supported it at such
irregular intervals that it looked like a vast infernal temple in which
demons were waging war, and undermining the roof in their senseless
fury.

In some places whole blocks of houses were blazing; here and there high
buildings burned in solitary grandeur, the flames leaping from every
window or boiling from the roof. Sometimes one of these buildings would
disappear in a shower of sparks and an awful roar, or a row of humbler
houses was lifted bodily from the ground to burst into a thousand
particles of flying wood, and disappear.

The heat was overpowering (she bathed her face constantly from the
pitcher) and the roar of the flames, the constant explosions of
dynamite, the loud vicious crackling of wood, the rending and splitting
of masonry, the hoarse impact of walls as they met the earth, was the
scene's wild orchestral accompaniment and, despite underlying
apprehension and horror, gave Gora one of the few pleasurable
sensations of her life.

But she moved her chair after a moment and fixed her gaze, no longer
rapt but ironic, on the flaming hillcrests, the long line of California
Street, nucleus of the wealth and fashion of San Francisco. The Western
Addition was fashionable and growing more so, but it had been too far
away for the pioneers of the fifties and sixties, the bonanza kings of
the seventies, the railroad magnates of the eighties, and they had
built their huge and hideous mansions upon the hill that rose almost
perpendicularly above the section where they made and lost their
millions. Some wag or toady had named it Nob Hill and the inhabitants
had complacently accepted the title, although they refrained from
putting it on their cards. And now it was in flames.



II


Gora recalled the day when she had walked slowly past those mansions,
staring at each in turn as she assimilated the disheartening and
infuriating fact that she and the children that inhabited them belonged
to different worlds.

Her family at that time lived in a cottage at the wrong end of Taylor
Street Hill, and, Mrs. Dwight having received a small legacy from a
sister recently deceased which had convinced her, if not her less
mercurial husband, that their luck had finally turned, had sent Gora,
then a rangy girl of thirteen, fond of books and study, to a large
private school in the fashionable district.

Gora, after all these years, ground her teeth as she had a sudden
blighting vision of the day a week later, when, puzzled and resentful,
she had walked up the steep hill with several of the girls whose homes
were on California and Taylor Streets, and two of whom, like herself,
were munching an apple.

They had hardly noticed her sufficiently to ignore her, either then or
during the previous week, so absorbed were they in their own close
common interests. She listened to allusions which she barely could
comprehend, but it was evident that one was to give a party on Friday
night and the others were expected as a matter of course. Gora assumed
that Jim and Sam and Rex and Bob were brothers or beaux. Last names
appeared to be no more necessary than labels to inform the outsider of
the social status of these favored maidens, too happy and contented to
be snobs but quite callous to the feelings of strange little girls.

They drifted one by one into their opulent homes, bidding one another a
careless or a sentimental good-by, and Gora, throwing her head as far
back on her shoulders as it would go without dislocation, stalked down
to the unfashionable end of Taylor Street and up to the solitude of her
bedroom under the eaves of the cottage.

On the following day she had lingered in the school yard until the
other girls were out of sight, then climbing the almost perpendicular
hill so rapidly that she arrived on the crest with little breath and a
pain in her side, she had sauntered deliberately up and down before the
imposing homes of her schoolmates, staring at them with angry and
puzzled eyes, her young soul in tumult. It was the old inarticulate cry
of class, of the unchosen who seeks the reason and can find none.



III


As she had a tendency not only to brood but to work out her own
problems it was several days before she demanded an explanation of her
mother.

Mrs. Dwight, a prematurely gray and wrinkled woman, who had once been
handsome with good features and bright coloring, and who wore a
deliberately cheerful expression that Gora often wanted to wipe off,
was sitting in the dining-room making a skirt for her daughter; which,
Gora reflected bitterly, was sure to be too long on one side if not in
front.

Mrs. Dwight's smile faded as she looked at the somber face and huddled
figure in the worn leather arm-chair in which Mr. Dwight spent his
silent evenings.

"Why, my dear, you surely knew long before this that some people are
rich and others poor--to say nothing of the betwixts and betweens." She
was an exact woman in small matters. "That's all there is to it. I
thought it a good idea to send you to a private school where you might
make friends among girls of your own class."

"Own class? They treat me like dirt. How am I of their class when they
live in palaces and I in a hovel?"

"I have reproved you many times for exaggerated speech. What I meant
was that you are as well-born as any of them (better than many) only we
have been unfortunate. Your father tried hard enough, but he just
doesn't seem to have the money-making faculty like so many men. Now,
we've had a little luck I'm really hopeful. I've just had a nice letter
from your Aunt Eliza Goring--I named you for her, but I couldn't
inflict you with Eliza. You know she is many years older than I am and
has no children. She was out here once just before you were born.
We--we were very hard up indeed. It was she who furnished this cottage
for us and paid a year's rent. Soon after, your father got his present
position and we have managed to get along. She always sends me a little
cheque at Christmas and I am sure--well, there are some things we don't
say.... But this legacy from your Aunt Jane is the only real stroke of
luck we ever had, and I can't help feeling hopeful. I do believe better
times are coming.... It used to seem terribly hard and unjust that so
many people all about us had so much and we nothing, and that in this
comparatively small city we knew practically no one. But I have got
over being bitter and envious. You do when you are busy every minute.
And then we have the blessing of health, and Mortimer is the best boy
in the world, and you are a very good child when you are not in a bad
temper. I think you will be handsome, too, although you are pretty
hopeless at present; but of course you will never have anything like
Mortimer's looks. He is the living image of the painting of your
Great-great-great-grandfather Dwight that used to hang in the
dining-room in Utica, and who was in the first Congress. Now, do try
and make friends with the nicer of the children."

But Gora's was not a conciliating nor a compromising nature. Her idea
of "squaring things" was to become the best scholar in her classes and
humiliate several young ladies of her own age who had held the first
position with an ease that had bred laxity. Greatly to the satisfaction
of the teachers an angry emulation ensued with the gratifying result
that although the girls could not pass Gora, their weekly marks were
higher, and for the rest of the term they did less giggling even after
school hours, and more studying.

But Gora would not return for a second term. She had made no friends
among the girls, although, no doubt, having won their respect, they
would, with the democracy of childhood, have admitted her to intimacy
by degrees, particularly if she had proved to be socially malleable.

But for some obscure reason it made Gora happier to hate them all, and
when she had passed her examinations victoriously, and taken every
prize, except for tidiness and deportment, she said good-by with some
regret to the teachers, who had admired and encouraged her but did not
pretend to love her, and announced as soon as she arrived at home that
she should enter the High School at the beginning of the following term.



IV


Her parents were secretly relieved. Even Mrs. Dwight's vision of future
prosperity had faded. She had been justified in believing that her
sister Eliza would make a will in favor of her family, but
unfortunately Mrs. Goring had amused herself with speculation in her
old age, and had left barely enough to pay her funeral expenses.

Mrs. Dwight broached the subject of their immediate future to her
husband that evening. She had some time since made up her mind, in case
the school experiment was not a success, to furnish a larger house with
what remained of the legacy, and take boarders.

"I wouldn't do it if Gora had made the friends I hoped for her," she
said, turning the heel of the first of her son's winter socks, "and
there's no such thing as a social come-down for us; for that matter,
there is more than one lady, once wealthy, who is keeping a
boarding-house in this town. Gora will have to work anyhow, and as for
Mortimer--" she glanced fondly at her manly young son, who was amiably
playing checkers in the parlor with his sister, "he is sure to make his
fortune."

"I don't know," said Mr. Dwight heavily. "I don't know."

"Why, what do you mean?" asked his wife sharply.

Mrs. Dwight belonged to that type of American women whose passions in
youth are weak and anæmic, not to say exceedingly shame-faced, but
which in mature years become strong and selfish and jealous, either for
a lover or a son. Mrs. Dwight, being a perfectly respectable woman, had
centered all the accumulated forces of her being on the son whom she
idealized after the fashion of her type; and as she had corrected his
obvious faults when he was a boy, it was quite true that he was kind,
amiable, honest, honorable, patriotic, industrious, clean, polite, and
moral; if hardly as handsome as Apollo or as brilliant and gifted as
she permitted herself to believe.

"What do you mean?" she repeated, although she lowered her voice. It
was rarely that it assumed an edge when addressing her husband. She had
never reproached him for being a failure, for she had recognized his
limitations early and accepted her lot. But something in his tone shook
her maternal complacence and roused her to instant defense.

Mr. Dwight took his pipe from his mouth and also cast a glance toward
the parlor, but the absorbed players were beyond the range of his
rather weak voice.

"I mean this," he said with nothing of his usual vague hesitancy of
speech. "I'm not so sure that Morty is beyond clerk size."

"You--you--John Dwight--your son--" The thin layer of pale flesh on
Mrs. Dwight's face seemed to collapse upon its harsh framework with the
terrified wrath that shook her. Her mouth fell apart, and hot smarting
tears welled slowly to her eyes, faded with long years of stitching;
not only for her own family but for many others when money had been
more than commonly scarce. "Mortimer can do anything. Anything."

"Can he? Why doesn't he show it then? He went to work at sixteen and is
now twenty-two. He is drawing just fifty dollars a month. He's well
liked in the firm, too."

"Why don't they raise his salary?"

"Because that's all he's worth to them. He's a good steady honest
clerk, nothing more."

"He's very young--"

"If a man has initiative, ability, any sort of constructive power in
his brain he shows it by the time he is twenty-two--if he has been in
that forcing house for four or five years. That is the whole history of
this country. And employers are always on the look-out for those
qualities and only too anxious to find them and push a young man on and
up. Many a president of a great business started life as a clerk, or
even office boy--"

"That is what I have always known would happen to Morty. I am sure,
sure, that you are doing him a cruel injustice."

"I hope I am. But I am a failure myself and I know what a man needs in
the way of natural equipment to make a success of his life."

"But he is so energetic and industrious and honorable and likable and--"

"I was all that."

"Then--" Mrs. Dwight's voice trailed off; it sounded flat and old.
"What do you both lack?"

"Brains."



V


Mrs. Dwight had repeated this conversation to Gora shortly before her
death, and the girl in her reminiscent mood recalled it as she stared
with somber eyes and ironic lips at the havoc the fire was playing with
those lofty mansions which had stood to her all these intervening years
as symbols of the unpardonable injustice of class.

She recalled another of the few occasions when Mrs. Dwight, who
believed in acceptance and contentment, had been persuaded to discuss
the idiosyncrasies of her adopted city.

"It isn't that money is the standard here as it is in New York. Of
course there is a very wealthy set these late years and they set a pace
that makes it difficult for the older families, like the Groomes for
instance--I met Mrs. Groome once at a summer resort where I was
housekeeper that year, and I thought her very typical and interesting.
She was so kind to me without seeing me at all.... But those fine old
families, who are all of good old Eastern or Southern stock--if they
manage to keep in society are still the most influential element in
it.... Family.... Having lived in California long enough to be one of
that old set.... To be, without question, one of them. That is all that
matters. I've come in contact with a good many of them first and last
in my poor efforts to help your father, and I believe the San
Franciscans to be the most loyal and disinterested people in the
world-to one another.

"But if you come in from the outside you must bring money, or
tremendous family prestige, or the right kind of social personality
with the best kind of letters. We just crept in and were glad to be
permitted to make a living. Why should they have taken any notice of
us? They don't go hunting about for obscure people of possibly gentle
blood. That doesn't happen anywhere in the world. You must be
reasonable, my dear child. That is life, 'The World.'"

But Gora was not gifted with that form of reasonableness. She had
wished in her darker moments that she had been born outright in the
working-class; then, no doubt, she would have trudged contentedly every
morning (except when on strike) to the factory or shop, or been some
one's cook. She was an excellent cook. What galled her was the fact of
virtually belonging to the same class as these people who were still
unaware of the existence of her family, although it had lived for over
thirty years in a city numbering to-day only half a million inhabitants.

She was almost fanatically democratic and could see no reason for
differences of degree in the aspiring classes. To her mind the only
line of cleavage between the classes was that which divided people of
education, refinement of mind manners and habits, certain inherited
traditions, and the mental effort no matter how small to win a place in
this difficult world, from commonness, ignorance, indifference to dirt,
coarse pleasures and habits, and manual labor. She respected Labor as
the solid foundation stones upon which civilization upheld itself, and
believed it to have been biologically chosen; if she had been born in
its class she would have had the ambition to work her way out of it,
but without resentment.

There her recognition of class stopped. That wealth or family
prominence even in a great city or an old community should create an
exclusive and favored society seemed to her illogical and outrageous. A
woman was a lady or she wasn't. A man was a gentleman or he wasn't.
That should be the beginning and the end of the social code.... When
she had been younger she had lamented her mean position because it
excluded her from the light-hearted and brilliant pleasures of youth;
but as she grew older this natural craving had given place to a far
deeper and more corrosive resentment.

She had no patience with her brother's ingenuous snobbery. A
good-natured friend had introduced him to one or two houses where there
were young people and much dancing and he had been "taken up." Nothing
would have filled Gora with such murderous rage as to be taken up. She
wanted her position conceded as a natural right.

Had it been in her power she would have forced her conception of
democracy upon the entire United States. But as this was quite
impossible she longed passionately for some power, personal and
irresistible, that would compel the attention of the elect in the city
of her birth and ultimately bring them to her feet. And here she had a
ray of hope.



VI


Meanwhile it was some satisfaction to watch them being burned out of
house and home.

Then she gave a short impatient sigh that was almost a groan, as she
wondered if her own home would go. The family had moved into it eight
years ago; and after Mr. Dwight's death his widow had barely made a
living for herself and her daughter out of the uncertain boarders.
Mortimer had paid his share, but she had encouraged him to dress well
and no one knew the value of "front" better than he. After her death,
three years ago, Gora had turned out the boarders and the last
slatternly wasteful cook and let her rooms to business women who made
their morning coffee over the gas jet. The new arrangement paid very
well and left her time for lectures at the University of California,
and for other studies. A Jap came in daily to put the rooms in order
and she cooked for herself and her brother. So unknown was she that
even Aileen Lawton was unaware that the "boarding-house down on Geary
Street" was a lodging house kept by Mortimer Dwight's sister.
Fortunately Gora was spared one more quivering arrow in her pride.




CHAPTER VIII



I


There was a tremendous burst of dynamite that rocked the house. Then
she heard her brother's voice:

"Gora! Gora! Where are you?"

She let herself through the trap door and ran down to the first floor.

Her brother was standing in the lower hall surrounded by several of
their lodgers, competent-looking women, quite calm and business like,
but dressed as for a journey and carrying suitcases and bags.

"You are all ordered out," he was saying. "A change of the wind to the
south would sweep the fire right up this hill, and it may cross Van
Ness Avenue again at any time. So everybody is ordered out to the
western hills, or the Presidio, or across the Bay, if they can make it."

He had no private manners and greeted his sister with the same gallant
smile and little air of deference which always carried him a certain
distance in public. "You had better take out a mattress and blanket,"
he said. "I wish I could do it for you--for all of you--but I am under
orders and must patrol where I am sent. When I finish giving the orders
down here I must go back to the Western Addition."

"Don't worry about us," said Gora drily. "We are all quite as capable
as men when it comes to looking out for ourselves in a catastrophe. I
hear that several wives led their weeping stricken husbands out of town
yesterday morning. Are you sure the fire will cross Van Ness Avenue
to-night?"

"It may be held back by the dynamiting, but one can be sure of nothing.
Of course the wind may shift to the west any minute. That would save
this part of the city."

"Well, don't let us keep you from your civic duties. You look very well
in those hunting boots. Lucky you went on that expedition last summer
with Mr. Cheever."

Mortimer frowned slightly and turned to the door. The brother and
sister rarely talked on any but the most impersonal subjects, but more
than once he had had an uneasy sense that she knew him better than he
knew himself. His consciousness had never faced anything so absurd, but
there were times when he felt an abrupt desire to escape her enigmatic
presence and this was one of them.



II


The lodgers were permitted by the patrol to cook their luncheon on the
stove that had been set up in the street, the orders being that they
should leave within an hour. After their smoky meal they departed,
carrying mattresses and blankets.

Gora had no intention of following them unless the flames were actually
roaring up the block between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street. She
felt quite positive that she could outrun any fire.

The last of the lodgers, at her request, shut the front door and made a
feint of locking it, an unnecessary precaution in any case as all the
windows were open; and as the sentries had been ordered to "shoot to
kill," and had obeyed orders, looting had ceased.




CHAPTER IX



I


Gora went up to the large attic which, soon, after her mother's death,
she had furnished for her personal use. The walls were hung with a thin
bluish green material and there were several pieces of good furniture
that she had picked up at auctions. One side of the room was covered
with book shelves which Mortimer had made for her on rainy winter
nights and they were filled with the books she had found in second-hand
shops. A number of them bore the autographs of men once prosilient in
the city's history but long since gone down to disaster. There were a
few prints that she had found in the same way, but no oils or water
colors or ornaments. She despised the second-rate, and the best of
these was rarely to be bought for a song even at auction.

She sighed as she reflected that if obliged to flee to the hills there
was practically nothing she could save beyond the contents of her bags;
but at least she could remain with her treasures until the last minute,
and she pinned the curtains across the small windows and lit several
candles.

Between the blasts of dynamite the street was very quiet. She could
hear the measured tread of the sentry as he passed, a member of the
Citizens' Patrol, like her brother. Suddenly she heard a shot, and
extinguishing the candles hastily she peered out of a window from
behind the curtains. The sentry was pounding on a door opposite with
the butt of his rifle. It was the home of an eccentric old bachelor who
possessed a fine collection of ceramics and a cellar of vintage wine.

The door opened with obvious reluctance and the head of Mr. Andrew
Bennett appeared.

"What you doin' here?" shouted the sentry. "Haven't all youse been told
three hours ago to light out for the hills? Git out--"

"But the fire hasn't crossed Van Ness Avenue. I prefer--"

"Your opinion ain't asked. Git out."

"I call that abominable tyranny."

"Git out or I'll shoot. We ain't standin' no nonsense."

Gora recognized the voice as that of a young man, clerk in a butcher
shop in Polk Street, and appreciated the intense satisfaction he took
in his brief period of authority.

Mr. Bennett emerged in a moment with two large bags and walked
haughtily up the street at the point of the bayonet. Gora stood
expectantly behind her curtain, and some ten minutes later saw him
sneak round the eastern end of his block, dart back as the sentry
turned suddenly, and when the footsteps once more receded run up the
street and into his house. She laughed sympathetically and hoped he
would not be caught a second time.



II


Suddenly another man, carrying a woman in his arms, turned the same
corner. He was staggering as if he had borne a heavy burden a long
distance.

Gora ran down to the first floor and glanced out of the window of the
front room. The sentry had crossed the far end of the street and was
holding converse with another member of the patrol. As the refugee
staggered past the house she opened the front door and called softly.

"Come up quickly. Don't let them see you."

The man stumbled up the steps and into the house.

"You can put her on the sofa in this room." Gora led the way into what
had once been the front parlor and was now the chamber of her star
lodger. "Is she hurt?"

The man did not answer. He followed her and laid down his burden. Gora
flashed her electric torch on the face of the girl and drew back in
horror.

"Dead?"

"Yes, she is dead." The young man, who looked a mere boy in spite of
his unshaven chin and haggard eyes, threw himself into a chair and
dropping his face on his arms burst into heavy sobs.

Gora stared, fascinated, at the sharp white face of the girl, the rope
of fair hair wound round her neck like something malign and muscular
that had strangled her, the half-open eyes, whose white maleficent
gleam deprived the poor corpse of its last right, the aloofness and the
majesty of death. She may have been an innocent and lovely young
creature when alive, but dead, and lacking the usual amiable
beneficencies of the undertaker, she looked like a macabre wax work of
corrupt and evil youth.

And she was horribly stiff.



III


Gora went into the kitchen and made him a cup of coffee over a spirit
lamp. He drank it gratefully, then followed her up to the attic as she
feared their voices might be overheard from the lower room. There he
took the easy chair and the cigarette she offered him and told his
story.

The young girl was his sister and they were English. She had been
visiting a relative in Santa Barbara when a sudden illness revealed the
fact that she had a serious heart affection. He had come out to take
her home and they had been staying at the Palace Hotel waiting for
suitable accommodations before crossing the continent.

His sister--Marian--had been terrified into unconsciousness by the
earthquake and he had carried her down the stairs and out into Market
Street, where she had revived. She had even seemed to be better than
usual, for the people in their extraordinary costumes, particularly the
opera singers, had amused her, and she had returned to the court of the
hotel and listened with interest to the various "experiences." Finally
they had climbed the four flights of stairs to their rooms and he had
helped her to dress--her maid had disappeared. They had remained until
the afternoon when the uncontrolled fires in the region behind the
hotel alarmed them, and with what belongings they could carry they had
gone up to the St. Francis Hotel, where they engaged rooms and left
their portmanteaux, intending to climb to the top of the hill, if
Marian were able, and watch the fire.

Half way up the hill she had fainted and he had carried her into a
house whose door stood open. There was no one in the house, and after a
futile attempt to revive her, he had run back to the hotel to find a
doctor. But among the few people that had the courage to remain so
close to the fire there was no doctor. The hotel clerk gave him an
address but told him not to be too sure of finding his man at home as
all the physicians were probably attending the injured, helping to
clear the threatened hospitals, or at work among the refugees, any
number of women having embraced the inopportune occasion to become
mothers.

The doctor whose address was given him not only was out but his house
was deserted; and, distracted, he returned to his sister.

He knew at once that she was dead.

He sat beside her for hours, too stunned to think.... It was some time
during the night that the roar of the fire seemed to grow louder, the
smoke in the street denser. Then it occurred to him that the
inhabitants of this house as well as of the doctor's, which was close
by, would not have abandoned their homes if they had not believed that
some time during the night they would be in the path of the flames. And
he had heard that the pipes of the one water system had been broken by
the earthquake.

He had caught up the body of his sister and walked westward until, worn
out, he had entered the basement of another empty house, and there he
had fallen asleep. When he awakened he was under the impression for a
moment that he was in the crater of a volcano in eruption. Dynamite was
going off in all directions, he could hear the loud crackling of flames
behind his refuge; and as he took the body in his arms once more and
ran out, the fire was sweeping up the hill not a block below.

In spite of the smoke he inferred that the way was clear to the west,
and he had run on and on, once narrowly escaping a dynamiting area
where he saw men like dark shadows prowling and then rushing off madly
in an automobile ... dodging the fire, losing his way, once finding
himself confronting a wall of flames, finally crossing a wide avenue
... stumbling on ... and on....



IV


Gora decided that blunt callousness would help him more than sympathy.
He had recovered his self-control, but his eyes were still wide with
pain and horror.

"Cremation is a clean honest finish for any one," she remarked,
lighting another cigarette and offering him her match. "I should have
left her if she had been my sister in that first house...."

"I might have done it--in London. But ... perhaps I was not quite
myself.... I couldn't leave her to be burned alone in a strange
country. Besides, the horror of it would have killed my mother. Marian
was the youngest. I felt bound to do my best.... Perhaps I didn't think
at all.... If this house is threatened I shall take her out to the
Presidio, where I happen to know a man--Colonel Norris. Thanks to your
hospitality I can make it."

"But naturally you cannot go very fast ... and these sentries ... I am
not sure.... I don't see how you escaped others ... the smoke and
excitement, I suppose.... I think if you are determined to take her it
would be better if I helped you to carry her out to the cemetery. We
can put her on a narrow wire mattress and cover her, so that it will
look as if we were rescuing an invalid. Out there you can put her in
one of the stone vaults. Some of the doors are sure to have been broken
by the earthquake."

The young man, who had given his name as Richard Gathbroke, gratefully
rested in her brother's room while she kept watch on the roof. It was
night but the very atmosphere seemed ablaze and the dynamiting as well
as the approaching wall of fire looked very close. Finally when sparks
fell on the roof she descended hastily and awakened her guest, making
him welcome to her brother's linen as well as to a basin of precious
water. When he joined her in the kitchen he had even shaved himself and
she saw that he looked both older and younger than Americans of his
age; which, he had told her, was twenty-three. His fair well-modeled
face was now composed and his hazel eyes were brilliant and steady. He
had a tall trim military body, and very straight bright brown hair; a
rather conventional figure of a well-bred Englishman, Gora assumed;
intelligent, and both more naif and more worldly-wise than young
Americans of his class: but whose potentialities had hardly been
apprehended even by himself.

They ate as substantial a breakfast as could be prepared hastily over a
spirit lamp, filled their pockets with stale bread, cake, and small
tins of food, and then carried a narrow wire mattress from one of the
smaller bedrooms to the front room on the first floor.




CHAPTER X



I


The patrol had been relieved by another, an older man, and sober. He
merely reproved them for disobeying orders, glanced sympathetically at
the presumed invalid, and directed them to one of the temporary
hospitals some blocks farther west.

Gora, like all imaginative people, had a horror of the corpse, and
averted her eyes from the head of the dead girl outlined under the veil
she had thrown over it, Gathbroke was obliged to walk backward, and as
both were extremely uncomfortable, there was no attempt at conversation
until they reached the gates of the old cemetery the great pioneers had
called Lone Mountain and their more commonplace descendants
rechristened Laurel Hill.

The glare of the distant fire illuminated the silent city where a
thousand refugees slept as heavily as the dead, and as they ascended
the steep path they examined anxiously the vaults on either side.
Finally Gora exclaimed:

"There! On the right."

The iron doors of a once eminent resident's last dwelling had been half
twisted from their rusty hinges. Gathbroke threw his weight on them and
they fell at his feet. He and Gora carried in the body and lifted it to
an empty shelf.

"Good!" Gora gave a long sigh of relief. "Nothing can happen to her
now. Even the entrance faces away from the fire and there is nothing
but grass in the cemetery to burn, anyhow." She held her electric torch
to the inscription above the entrance. "Better write down the
name--Randolph. There's one of the tragedies of the sixties for you! An
Englishman the hero, by the way. Nina Randolph is a handful of dust in
there somewhere. Heigho! What's the difference, anyway? Even if she'd
been happy she'd be dead by this time--or too old to have a past."

Gathbroke replaced the gates, for he feared prowling dogs, and they
walked down to the street and sat on the grass, leaning against the
wall of the cemetery, as dissociated as possible from the rows of
uneasy sleepers.



II


They slept a little between blasts of dynamite, the snoring of men and
women and cries of children; finally at Gora's suggestion climbed to
the steep bare summit of Calvary to observe the progress of the fire.

The unlighted portion of the city beneath them looked like a dead
planet. Beyond was a tossing sea of flame whose far-reaching violent
glare seemed to project it illimitably.

"Nothing can stop it!" gasped Gora; and that terrific red mass of
energy and momentum did look as if its only curb would be the Pacific
Ocean.

They talked until morning. He was very frank about himself, finding no
doubt a profound comfort in human companionship after those long hours
of ghastly communion down in that flaming jungle.

He was a younger son and in the army, not badly off, as his mother made
him a goodish allowance. She had come of a large manufacturing family
in the North and had brought a fortune to the empty treasury of the
young peer she had--happily for both--fallen in love with.

He had wanted to go into business--politics later perhaps--after he
left Eton, feeling that he had inherited some of the energy of his
maternal grandfather, but his mother had insisted upon the army and as
he really didn't care so very much, he had succumbed.

"But I'm not sure I shan't regret it. It isn't as if there were any
prospect of a real war. I'd like a fighting career well enough, but not
picayune affairs out in India or Africa. I can't help thinking I have a
talent for business. Sounds beastly conceited," he added hastily. It
was evident that he was a modest youth. "But after all one of us should
inherit something of the sort. Perhaps, later, who knows? At least I
can thank heaven that I wasn't born in my brother's place. He likes
politics, and his fate is the House of Lords. A man might as well go
and embalm himself at once. Do you know Gwynne? Elton Gwynne? John
Gwynne he calls himself out here."

"I've heard of him. He's been written up a good deal. I don't know any
one of that sort."

"Really? Well, don't you see? he inherited a peerage; grandfather died
and his cousin shot himself to cover up a scandal. Gwynne was in the
full tide of his career in the House of Commons and simply couldn't
stand for it. He cut the whole business and came out here where he and
his mother had a large estate--Lady Victoria's mother or grandmother
was a Spanish-Californian. Of course he chucked the title. He's a sort
of cousin of mine and I looked him up, and dined with him the other
night. He was born in the United States, by a fluke as it were, and has
made up his mind to be an American for the rest of his life and carve
out a political career in this country. I'd have done the same thing,
by Jove! First-class solution ... although it's a pretty hard wrench to
give up your own country. But when a man is too active to
stagnate--there you are.... I wish I had known where to find him
to-day, but he lives on his ranch and I've only seen him once since.
Lady Victoria took me to a ball night before last--Good God! Was it
only that? ... and we were to have met again for lunch to-day."

"It is very easy and picturesque to renounce when you possess just
about everything in life! If I attempted to renounce any of my
privileges, for instance. I should simply move down and out."



III


He turned his head and regarded her squarely for the first time.
Heretofore she had been simply a friend in need, a jolly good sport,
incidentally a female. If she had been beautiful he should have noted
that fact at once, for he could not imagine the circumstances in which
beauty would not exert an immediate and powerful influence, however
transitory.

Miss Dwight was not beautiful, but he concluded during that frank stare
that her face was interesting; disturbingly so, although he was unable
at the moment to find the reason. It was possible that in favorable
conditions she would be handsome.

She had a mass of dark brown hair that seemed to sink heavily over her
low forehead until it almost met the heavy black eyebrows. She had
removed her hat and the thick loose coils made her look topheavy; for
the face, if wide across the high cheek-bones and sharply accentuated
with a salient jaw, was not large. The eyes were a light cold gray,
oval and far apart. Her nose was short and strong and had the same
cohibitive expression as the straight sharply-cut mouth--when not
ironic or smiling. Her teeth were beautiful.

She had put on her best tailored suit and he saw that her "figger" was
good although too short and full for his taste. He liked the long and
stately slenderness that his own centuries had bred. But her hands and
well-shod feet were narrow if not small, and he decided that she just
escaped possessing what modern slang so aptly expressed as "class,"
Possibly it was the defiance in her square chin, the almost angry poise
of her head, that betrayed her as an unwilling outsider.

"Bad luck!" he asked sympathetically.

She gave him a brief outline of her family history, overemphasizing as
Americans will--those that lay any claim to descent--the previous
importance of the Dwights and the Mortimers in Utica, N.Y.
Incidentally, she gave him a flashlight picture of the social
conditions in San Francisco.

He was intensely interested. "Really! I should have said there would be
the complete democracy in California if anywhere. Of course no
Englishman of my generation expects to find San Franciscans in cowboy
costume; but I must say I was astonished at the luxury and fashion not
only at those Southern California hotels, where, to be sure, most of
the guests are from your older Eastern states, but at that ball Lady
Victoria took me to. It was magnificent in all its details, originality
combined with the most perfect taste. Of course there were not as many
jewels as one would see at a great London function, but the toilettes
could not have been surpassed. And as for the women--stunning! Such
beauty and style and breeding. I confess I didn't expect quite all
that. Miss Bascom, Miss Thorndyke, and an exquisite young thing, Miss
Groome--"

"Oh, those are the haute noblesse." Gora's tipper lip curled
satirically. "No doubt they lay claim that their roots mingle with your
own."

"Well, we'd be proud of 'em."

"That was the Hofer ball, wasn't it! Do you mean to say that Alexina
Groome was there? Mrs. Groome, who is the most imposing relic of the
immortal eighties, is supposed to know no one of twentieth-century
vintage."

"I am sure of it. I danced with her twice and would have jolly well
liked to monopolize her, but she was too plainly bowled over by a
fellow--your name, by Jove--Dwight. Good-looking chap, clean-cut, fine
shoulders, danced like a god--if gods do dance. I'm an awful duffer at
it, by the way."

"Mortimer? Is it possible? And he--was he bowled over?"

"Ra--ther! A case, I should say."

"How unfortunate. Of course he hasn't the ghost of a chance. Mrs.
Groome won't have a young man inside her doors whose family doesn't
belong root and branch to her old set. Fine prospect for a poor clerk!"

"Jove! I've a mind to stay and try my luck. Oh!" He dropped his face in
his hands. "I'm forgetting!"

"Well, forget again." Gora's voice expressed more sympathy than she
felt. She deeply resented his immediate acceptance of her social
alienage, even relegating her personal appearance to another class than
that of the delicate flora he had seen blooming for the night against
the most artful background of the season.

However ... he was the first man she had ever met in her limited
experience who seemed to combine the three magnetisms.... Who could
tell....

"I should be delighted if you would cut my brother out before it goes
any further," she said untruthfully. "It will save him a heartache....
Where could you meet her now? Society is disrupted here. But of course
Mr. Gwynne visits down the peninsula. He could take you to any one of
those exclusive abodes where you would be likely to meet the little
Alexina. She is only eighteen, by the way."

"That is rather young," he said dubiously. "I don't fancy her
conversation would be very interesting, and, after all, that is what it
comes down to, isn't it? I've been disappointed so often." He sighed
and looked quite thirty-five. "Still, she has personality. Five or six
years hence she may be a wonder.... I don't think I'd care about
educating and developing a girl--I like a pal right away.... What an
ass I am, rotting like this. Tour brother has as much chance as I have.
Younger sons with no prospect of succession are of exactly no account
with the American mamma. I've met a few of them."

"Oh, I fancy birth would be enough for Mrs. Groome. She's quite dotty
on the subject, and the people out here are simpler than Easterners,
anyhow. Simpler and more ingenuous."

"How is it you know so much about it, all, if you are not, as you
say--pardon me--a part of it?"

"I wonder!" She gave a short hard little laugh. "I don't know that I
could explain, except that it all has seemed to me from birth a part of
my blood and bones and gristle. An accident, a lucky strike on my
father's part when he first came out here, and they would know me as
well to-day as I know them. And then ... of course ... it is a small
community. We live on the doorsteps of the rich and important, as it
were. It would be hard for us not to know. It just comes to us. We are
magnets. I suppose all this seems to you--born on the inside--quite
ignominious."

"Well, my mother would have remained on the outside--that is to say a
quiet little provincial--if her father hadn't happened to make a
fortune with his iron works. I can understand well enough, but, if you
don't mind my saying so, I think it rather a pity."

"Pity?"

"I mean thinking so much about it, don't you know? I fancy it's the
result of living in a small city where there are only a few hundred
people between you and the top instead of a few hundred thousand. I
express, myself so badly, but what I mean is--as I make it out--it is,
with you, a case of so near and yet so far. In a great city like London
now (great in generations--centuries--as well as in numbers) you'd just
accept the bare fact and go about your business. Not a ghost of a show,
don't you see? Here you've just missed it, and, the middle class always
flowing into the upper class, you feel that you should get your chance
any minute. Ought to have had it long ago.... I can't imagine, for
instance, that if my mother had married the son of my grandfather's
partner that I should have wasted much time wondering why I wasn't
asked to the Elizabethan Hail on the hill. Of course I don't mean there
isn't envy enough in the old countries, but it's more passive ...
without hope...."

He felt awkward and officious but he was sorry for her and would have
liked to discharge his debt by helping her toward a new point of view,
if possible.

She replied: "That's easy to say, and besides you are a man. My
brother, who is only a clerk in a wholesale house, has been taken up
and goes everywhere. They don't know that I even exist."

"Well, that's their loss," he said gallantly. "Can't you make 'em sit
tip, some way? Women make fortunes sometimes, these days, And they're
in about everything except the Army and Navy. Business? Or haven't you
a talent of some sort? You have--pardon me again, but we have been
uncommonly personal to-night--a strong and individual face ... and
personality; no doubt of that."

Gora would far rather he had told her she was pretty and irresistible,
but she thrilled to his praise, nevertheless. It was the first
compliment she had ever received from any man but the commonplace and
unimportant friends her brother had brought home occasionally before he
had been introduced to society; he took good care to bring home none of
his new friends.

Her heart leapt toward this exalted young Englishman, who might have
stepped direct from one of the novels of his land and class ... even
the stern and anxious moderns who had made England's middle-class the
fashion, occasionally drew a well-bred and attractive man from life....
She turned to him with a smile that banished the somber ironic
expression of her face, illuminating it as if the drooping spirit
within had suddenly lit a torch and held it behind those strange pale
eyes.

"I'll tell you what I've never told any one--but my teacher; I've taken
lessons with him for a year. He is an instructor in the technique of
the short story, and has turned out quite a few successful magazine
writers. He believes that I have talent. I have been studying over at
the University to the same end--English, biology, psychology,
sociology. I'm determined not to start as a raw amateur. Oh! Perhaps I
have made a mistake in telling you. You may be one of those men that
are repelled by intellectual women!"

"Not a bit of it. Don't belong to that class of duffers anyway. I don't
like masculine women, or hard women--run from a lot of our girls that
are so hard a diamond wouldn't cut 'em. But I've got an elder
sister--she's thirty now--who's the cleverest woman I ever met,
although she doesn't pretend to do anything. She won't bother with any
but clever and exceptional people--has something of a salon. My parents
hate it--she lives alone in a flat in London--but they can't help it.
My grandfather Doubleton liked her a lot and left her two thousand a
year. I wish you knew her. She is charming and feminine, as much so as
any of those I met at the ball; and so are many of the women that go to
her flat--"

"Don't you think I am feminine?" asked Gora irrisistibly. He had a way
of making her feel, quite abruptly, as if she had run a needle under
her fingernail.

Once more he turned to her his detached but keen young eyes.

"Well ... not exactly in the sense I mean. You look too much the
fighter ... but that may be purely the result of circumstances," he
added hastily: the strange eyes under their heavy down-drawn browns
were lowering at him. "You are not masculine, no, not a bit."

Once more Miss Dwight curled her upper lip. "I wonder if you would have
said the first part of that if you had met me at the Hofer ball and I
had worn a gown of flame-colored chiffon and satin, and my hair
marcelled like every other woman present--except those embalmed relics
of the seventies, who, I have heard, rise from the grave whenever a
great ball is given, and appear in a built-up red-brown wig.... And a
string of pearls round my throat? My neck and arms are quite good;
although I've never possessed an evening gown, I know I'd look quite
well in one ... my best."

He laughed. "It does make a difference. I wish you had been there. I am
sure you are as good a dancer as you are a pal. But still ... I think I
should have recognized the fighter, even if you had been born in the
California equivalent for the purple. I fancy you would have found some
cause or other to get your teeth into once in a while. Tell me, don't
you rather like the idea of taking Life by the throat and forcing it to
deliver?"

"I wonder? ... perhaps ... but that does not mitigate my resentment
that I am on the outside of everything when I belong on the in. I
should never have been forced to strive after what is mine by natural
right."

"Well, don't let it make a socialist of you. That is such a cheap
revenge on society.... Confession of failure; and nothing in it."



IV


He looked at his watch: "Eight o'clock. I'll be getting on to the
Presidio. Why don't you come with me?"

Gora's feminine instincts arose from a less perverted source than her
social. She shook her head with a smile.

"I don't want to go any farther from my house. I shall slip down my
first chance; and I have plenty to eat. Perhaps you will come to see me
before you go if my house is spared."

"Rather. What is the number? And if the house goes I'll find you
somehow."

He took her hand in both his and shook it warmly. "You are the best pal
in the world--"

"Now don't make me a nice little speech. I'm only too glad. Go out to
the Presidio and get a hot breakfast and attend--to--to your affairs. I
am sure everything will be all right, although you may not be able to
get away as soon as you hope."

"I don't like leaving you alone here--"

"Alone?" She waved her hand at the hundreds of recumbent forms in the
cemeteries and on the lower slopes of Calvary. "I probably shall never
be so well protected again. Please go."

He shook her hand once more, ran down the hill, turned and waved his
cap, and trudged off in the direction of the Presidio.



V


She slept in her own house that night, for dynamiting by miners
summoned from Grass Valley by General Funston, and a change of wind,
had saved the western portion of the city. For the first time in her
life Gora experienced a sense of profound gratitude, almost of
happiness. She felt that only a little more would make her quite happy.
Her lodgers, even her absorbed brother, noticed that her manner, her
expression, had perceptibly softened. She herself noticed it most of
all.




CHAPTER XI



I


Gathbroke met Alexina Groome again a week later.

On Saturday, when the fire was over, and she could retreat decently and
in good order, Mrs. Groome, to her young daughter's secret anguish, had
consented to rest her nerves for a fortnight at Rincona, Mrs. Abbott's
home in Alta.

As Gora had predicted, Gathbroke found that it would have been hardly
more difficult to move his sister's body, now at an undertaker's in
Fillmore Street, out of the state in war-time than in the wake of a
city's disaster, which was scattering its population to every point of
the railroad compass. He had refused the space in the baggage car
offered to him by the company; it should: be a private car or nothing;
and for that, in spite of all the influence Gwynne and his powerful
friends could bring to bear, he must wait.

Meanwhile Gwynne had asked him to stay with himself and his mother,
Lady Victoria Gwynne, at the house of his fiancée, Isabel Otis, on
Russian Hill; a massive cliff rising above one of the highest of the
city's northern hills, whose old houses, clinging to its steep sides
had escaped the fire that roared about its base. To-day it was a green
and lofty oasis in the midst of miles of smoking ruins.

Gathbroke was as nervous as only a young Englishman within his
immemorial armor can be. Gwynne, who had gone through the same
nerve-racking crisis, although from different causes, understood what
he suffered and pressed him into service in the distribution of
government rations, and garments to the different refugee camps. But
Gathbroke had the active imagination of intelligent youth, and he never
forgot to blame himself for lingering in New York with some interesting
chaps he had met on the _Majestic_, and afterward in Southern
California, seduced by its soft climate and violent color.
Unquestionably, if he had stayed on his job, as these expressive
Americans put it, his sister would have been in New York, possibly on
the Atlantic Ocean when San Francisco shook herself to ruin.

"But not necessarily alive," said Lady Victoria callously, removing her
cigar, her heavy eyes that looked like empty volcanos, staring down
over the smoldering waste. "People with heart disease don't invariably
wait for an earthquake to jolt them out of life. Assume that her time
had come and think of something else or you'll become a silly ass of a
neurotic."

Gwynne, more sympathetic, continued to find him what distraction he
could, and one day drove him down the Peninsula with a message from the
Committee of Fifty to Tom Abbott; who had caught a heavy cold during
those three days when he had driven a car filled with dynamite and had
had scarcely an hour for rest. He was now at home in bed.



II


The Abbott's place, Rincona, stood on a foothill behind the other
estates of Alta and surrounded by a park of two hundred acres set thick
with magnificent oaks. Gathbroke had never seen finer ones in England
or France. Gwynne before entering the avenue drove to an elevation
above the house and stopped the car for a moment.

The great San Mateo valley looked like a close forest of ancient oaks
broken inartistically by the roofs of houses shorn of their chimneys.
Beyond, on the eastern side of a shallow southern arm of the Bay of San
Francisco, was the long range of the Contra Costa mountains, its waving
indented slopes incredibly graceful in outline and lovely in color.
Gwynne had pointed out their ever changing tints and shades as they
drove through the valley; at the moment they were heliotrope deepening
to purple in the hollows.

Behind the foothills above Rincona rose the lofty mountains which in
Maria Abbott's youth had seemed to tower above the valley a solid wall
of redwoods; but long since plundered and defaced for the passing needs
of man.

"Great country--what?" said Gwynne, starting the car. "You couldn't pry
me away from it--that is, unless I have the luck to represent it in
Washington half the year. You'll be coming back yourself some day."

"I? Never. I hate the sight of its grinning blue sky after the red
horror of those three days. I haven't seen a cloud as big as my hand,
and in common decency it should howl and stream for months."

"Well, forget it for a day. Perhaps you will be placed next the fair
Alexina at luncheon--"

"Alexina...?"

"Groome. You must have met her at the Hofer ball."

"She--what--possible--"

Gwynne looked at his stuttering and flushed young cousin and burst into
laughter.

"As bad as that, was it? Well, she's not bespoken as far as I know.
Wade in and win. You have my blessing. She is almost as beautiful as
Isabel--"

"She's quite as beautiful as Miss Otis."

"Oh, very well. No doubt I'd think so myself if I hadn't happened to
meet Isabel first, and if I were not too old for her anyway."

Gwynne could think of no better remedy for demoralized nerves than a
flirtation with a resourceful California girl, and if Dick annexed a
living companion for his trying journey to England so much the better.

Gathbroke's excitement subsided quickly. He was in no condition for
sustained enthusiasm. He felt as if quite ten years had passed since he
had half fallen in love with Alexina Groome in a ball room that was now
a charred heap in the sodden wreck of a city he barely could conjure in
memory.

Besides, he had half fallen in love so often. And she was too young. He
had really been more drawn to that strange Miss Dwight; upon whom,
however, he had not yet called.

He felt thankful that the girl _was_ too young for his critical taste.
He wanted nothing more at present in the way of emotions.




CHAPTER XII



I


Rincona had been named in honor of Rincon Hill, where Tom Abbott's
grandmother had reigned in the sixties; a day, when in order to call on
her amiable rival, Mrs. Ballinger, her stout carriage horses were
obliged to plow through miles of sand hills, and to make innumerable
détours to avoid the steep masses of rock, over which in her grandson's
day cable car and trolley glided so lightly until that morning of April
eighteen, nineteen hundred and six.

When her husband, in common with other distinguished citizens, bought
an estate in the San Mateo Valley, she named it Rincona, to the secret
wrath of other eminent ladies who had not thought of it in time.

The house had as little pretensions to architectural beauty as others
of its era, but it was a large compact structure of some thirty rooms,
exclusive of the servants' quarters, and with as many outbuildings as a
Danish, farm. Long French windows opened upon a wide piazza, whose
pillars had disappeared long since under a luxuriant growth of rose
vines and wistaria. At its base was a bed of Parma violets, whose
fragrance a westerly breeze wafted to the end of the avenue a quarter
of a mile away. All about the house, breaking the smooth lawns, were
beds and trees of flowers, at this time of the year a glowing exotic
mass of color; but in the park that made up the greater part of the
estate exclusive of the farms, the grass under the superb oaks was
merely clipped, the weeds and undergrowth removed. The oaks had been
evenly shorn of their lower branches, which gave them a formal and
somewhat arrogant expression, as of cardinals and kings lifting their
skirts.

Alexina hated the enormous rooms with their high frescoed ceilings and
heavy Victorian furniture; but Maria Abbott loved and revered the old
house, emblem that it was of a secure proud family that had defied that
detestable (and disturbing) old phrase: "Three generations from shirt
sleeves to shirt sleeves." The Abbotts, like the Ballingers and Groomes
and Gearys and many others of that ilk, had not come to California in
the fifties and sixties as adventurers, but with all that was needed to
give them immediate prestige in the new community; and, among those
that still retained their estates in the San Mateo Valley, at least,
there was as little prospect of their reversion to shirt sleeves as of
their conversion to the red shirt of socialism. Their wealth might be
moderate but it was solid and steadfast.



II


The entertaining of the Abbotts, Yorbas, Hathaways, Montgomerys,
Brannans, Trennahans, and others of what Alexina irreverently called
the A.A., had always been ostentatiously simple, albeit a butler and a
staff of maids had contributed to their excessive comfort. In the
eighties, evening toilettes during the summer were considered immoral;
but by degrees, as time tooled in its irresistible modernities, they
gradually fell into the habit of wearing out their winter party gowns
at the evening diversions of the country season. Burlingame, that
borough of concentrated opulence founded in the early nineties as a
fashionable colony, began its career with a certain amount of
simplicity; but its millions increased to tens of millions; and what in
heaven's name, as Mrs. Clement Hunter, a leader and an individual, once
remarked, is the use of having money if you don't dress and entertain
as you would dream of dressing and entertaining if you didn't have a
cent?

Mrs. Hunter, who had formed an incongruous and somewhat hostile
alliance with Mrs. Abbott, knew that her valuable friend, like others
of that "small and early" band, resented the fact that their standards
no longer counted outside of their own set. Mrs. Abbott had turned a
haughty shoulder to Mrs. Hunter for a time, for she remembered her as,
in their school days, the socially obscure Lidie McKann; now, however,
her husband turning all he touched to gold, she had, incredibly, become
one of the most important women in San Francisco and Burlingame.

When Maria Abbott finally succumbed she assured herself that curiosity
to see the more ambushed glitter of that meretricious faubourg had
nothing to do with it; it was easy to persuade herself that she hoped,
being an indisputably smart woman herself, gradually to impose her
simpler and more appropriate standards upon these people who sorely
threatened the continued dominance of the old régime.

Mrs. Hunter soon disabused her of any such notion, and during the early
days of their acquaintance, after Mrs. Abbott came to one of her
luncheons attired in a pique skirt and severe shirtwaist, impeccably
cut and worn, but entirely out of place in an Italian palace, where
forty fashionable women, some of whom had motored sixty miles to attend
the function, were dressed as they would be at a Newport luncheon, Mrs.
Hunter attended the next solemn affair at Rincona so overdressed and
made up that the outraged Altarinos (as Alexina irreverently called
them) were reduced to a horrified silence that was almost hysterical.

But one morning Mrs. Abbott caught Mrs. Hunter digging in her private
vegetable garden behind the palace, and wearing a garment that her
second gardener's wife would have scorned, her unblemished face beaming
under a battered straw hat. Both women had the humor to laugh, and
their intimacy dated from that moment, Mrs. Hunter confessing that
stuff on her face made her sick; but adding that she adored dress and
thought that any rich woman was a fool who didn't.

After that there was a compromise on both sides. Mrs. Hunter lunched or
dined at Rincona in her simplest frocks and Mrs. Abbott wore her best
when honoring Mrs. Hunter and others at Burlingame. She even went so
far as to have some extremely smart silk voiles (the fashionable
material of the moment) and linens made, and when asked to a wedding, a
garden party, or a great function given to some visitor of distinction,
complimented the occasion to the limit of her resources.



III


Mrs. Hunter, in white duck, a sailor hat perched above her angular
somewhat masculine face, was sitting on the Abbott verandah as the two
Englishmen drove up. She waved her cigarette and cried gayly in her
hearty resonant voice:

"Two men! What luck! And in time for lunch. I've hardly seen a man
since the first day of the fire. Leave your car anywhere and come in
out of the sun. I'll call Maria, and, incidentally, mention whiskey and
soda."

"The whiskey and soda is all right," said Gwynne mopping his brow;
Nature, having wreaked her worst on California, seemed determined to
atone by unseasonably brilliant weather, and the day under the blazing
blue vault was very hot.

Mrs. Abbott appeared in a few moments, smiling, cool, in immaculate
white, the collar of her shirtwaist high and unwilted. Her
weather-beaten face looked years older than Mrs. Hunter's, who,
although plain by comparison with the once beautiful Maria Groome, had
treated her clean healthy skin with marked respect.

But as the butler had preceded her with whiskey and soda and ice, Mrs.
Abbott might already have achieved the mahogany tints of her mother and
she would have been regarded as enthusiastically by two hot and dusty
men.

"Of course you will stay to luncheon," she said as naturally as she had
said it these many years, and as two hospitable generations had said it
on that verandah before her. She turned to young Gathbroke with a
smile, for Mrs. Hunter, who was in her confidence, had detained her for
a moment with a few sharp incisive words. "I have a very bored little
sister, who will be glad to sit next to a young man once more."

And although Gathbroke almost frowned at this fresh reminder of the
callow years of the girl whose sheer loveliness had haunted his
imagination, he went off with a not disagreeable titillation of the
nerves, at Mrs. Abbott's suggestion, to find her in the park and bring
her back to luncheon in half an hour.




CHAPTER XIII



I


He was light of step and made no sound on the heavy turf; he saw her
several minutes before she was aware of his presence and stood staring
at her, feeling much as he had done during the progress of the
earthquake.

She was standing under one of the great oaks whose lower limbs had been
trimmed so evenly some seven feet above the ground that they made a
compact symmetrical roof above the dark head of the girl, who, being
alone, had abandoned the limp curve of fashion and was standing very
erect, drawn up to her full five feet seven. Alexina had no intention
of being afflicted with rounded shoulders when the present mode had
passed.

But her face expressed no guile as she stood there in her simple white
frock with a bunch of periwinkles in her belt, her delicate profile
turned to Gathbroke as she gazed at the irregular majesty of the Coast
Range, dark blue under a pale blue haze. He had retained the impression
of starry eyes and vivid coloring and eager happy youth, a body of
perfect slenderness and grace, whose magnetism was not that of youth
alone but personal and individual.

Now he saw that although her fine little profile was not too regular,
and as individual as her magnetism, the shape of her head was classic.
It was probable that she was not unaware of the fact, for its perfect
lines and curves were fully revealed by the severe flatness of the
dusky thickly planted hair, which was brushed back to the nape of her
neck and then drawn up a few inches and flared outward. The little head
was held high on the long white stem of the throat; and the pose, with
the dropping eyelids, gave her, in that deep shade, the illusion of
maturity. Gathbroke realized that he saw her for the moment as she
would look ten years hence. Even the full curved red lips were closed
firmly and once the nostrils quivered slightly.

The narrow black eyebrows following the subtle curve of her eyelids,
the low full brow with its waving line of soft black hair, seemed to
brood over the lower part of the face with its still indeterminate
curves, over the wholly immature figure of a very young girl.

Gathbroke surrendered then and there. This radiation of mystery, of
complexity, this secret subtle visit of maturity to youth, the hovering
spirit of the future woman, was unique in his experience and went
straight to his head. He forgot his sister, dismissed the thought of
Dwight with a gesture of contempt. He might be modest and rather
diffident in manner, owing to racial shyness, but he had a fine
sustaining substructure of sheer masculine arrogance.



II


As he walked forward swiftly Alexina turned; and immediately was the
young thing of eighteen and of the early twentieth century. Her spine
drooped into an indolent curve, her soft red lips fell apart, her
black-gray eyes opened wide as she held out her hand to the young
Englishman.

"How nice! I never really expected to see you again. I understood Lady
Victoria to say you were merely passing through."

Alexina had not cast him a thought since the night of the ball but she
was hospitable and feminine.

"I was detained."

She noted with intense curiosity that his bright color paled and his
sparkling hazel eyes darkened with a sudden look of horror; but the
spasm of memory passed quickly, and once more he was staring at her
with frank capitulation.

Alexina's head went up a trifle. She was still new to conquest, and
although she had met more than one pair of admiring eyes in the course
of the past season, and received as many compliments as the vainest
girl could wish, few men had had the courage to storm the stern
fortress on Ballinger Hill, or to sit more than once in a drawing-room
so darkly reminiscent of funeral ceremonies that a fellow's nerves
began to jump all over him.

Nor had her fancy been even lightly captured until Mortimer Dwight,
that perfect hero of maiden dreams, had swept her off her dancing feet
on the most memorable night of her life.

She had quite made up her mind to marry him. The indignant silent
hostility of the family (even Mrs. Ballinger, her moment of weakness
passed, having been swung to the horrified Maria's point of view) had
been all that was necessary to convince the young Alexina that fate had
sent her the complete romance. She hoped the opposition would drive her
to an elopement; little dreaming of the horror with which Mr. Dwight
would greet the heterodox alternative.

Mrs. Abbott had had a valid excuse for not asking him down: provisions
were scarce, and, so Tom said, he was doing useful work in town. But
Olive Bascom, whose country home was in San Mateo, had invited him for
the next week end, and he had accepted. Alexina was to be one of the
small house party, and there were many romantic walks behind San Mateo.
A moon was also due.



III


Still Gathbroke might have entered the race with an even chance, for
maidens of eighteen are merely the blind tools of Nature, had not the
family made the mistake of displaying too warm an approval of the
eligible young Englishman. Mrs. Groome, Mrs. Abbott, Aunt Clara,
reënforced even by the more worldly Mrs. Hunter, who, however, had no
children of her own, treated him throughout the luncheon with an almost
intimate cordiality and a lively personal interest; whereas, if Mrs.
Abbott had been driven to keep her word and invite Mortimer Dwight to
her historic board she would have depressed him with the cool pleasant
detachment she reserved for those whom she knew slightly and cared for
not at all; Mrs. Groome, automatically gracious, would have retired
within the formidable fortress of an exterior built in the still more
exclusive eighties; Aunt Clara would have sat petrified with horror at
the desecration; and Mrs. Hunter, free from the obligations of
hospitality, would have been brusque, frankly supercilious, made him as
uncomfortable as possible.

All this Alexina angrily resented, not knowing that their amiability
was in part inspired by sympathy, Gwynne having told them the story of
his cousin's tragic experience; although they did in truth regard him
as a possibly heaven-sent solution of a problem that was causing them
all, even Mrs. Hunter, acute anxiety.

Young Gathbroke was handsomer than Dwight. He was younger, and his
circumstances were far more romantic, if romance Alexina must have. It
was plain that he was fascinated by the dear silly child, who, in her
turn, would no doubt promptly forget the ineligible Dwight if the
Englishman proved to be serious and paid her persistent court.

Nevertheless Gathbroke, before the luncheon was half over, felt that he
was making no progress with Alexina. Subtly it was conveyed to him on
one of those unseen currents that travel directly to the sensitive
mind, that these amiable people knew his story; and, no doubt, in all
its harrowing details. Simultaneously those details flashed into his
own consciousness with a horrible distinctness, depressing his spirits
and extinguishing a natural gayety and light chaff that had come back
for a moment.

Moreover, to use his own expression, he was besottedly in love, and
knew that he betrayed himself every time his eyes met those of the
girl, who, he felt with bitterness and alarm, long before the salad,
was making a desperate attempt to entertain a very dull young man.

Once or twice a mocking glance flashed through those starry ingenuous
orbs, but was banished by the simple art of elevating the wicked iris
and revealing a line of saintly white. Alexina was quite determined to
add a British scalp to her small collection, and for the young man's
possible torment she cared not at all. With young arrogance she rather
despised him for his surrender before battle, or at all events for
hauling down his flag publicly; and her mind traveled with feminine
satisfaction to the calm smiling dominance, combined with utter
devotion, of the man who had won her as easily as she had conquered
Richard Gathbroke. That the young Englishman's nature was hot and
tempestuous, with depths that even he had not sounded, and her ideal
knight's more effective mien but the expression of a possibly meager
and somewhat puritanical nature; that Dwight's heart was a well-trained
organ which would never commit an indiscretion, and that young
Gathbroke would have sold the world for her if she had been a flower
girl, or the downfall of her fortunes had sent her clerking, she was
far too inexperienced to guess; and it is doubtful if the knowledge
would have affected her had she possessed it. She was in the obstinate
phase of first youth, common enough in girls of her sheltered class,
where the opportunities to study men and their behavior are few. Having
persuaded herself that she was far more romantic than she really was,
and that there would be no possible happiness or indeed interest in
life after youth, she had conceived as her ideal mate the dominant
male, the complete master, and easily persuaded herself that she had
found him in Mortimer Dwight.... If she married Gathbroke he would be
her slave (so little did she know him.). Dwight would be her master.
(So little did she know him, or herself.)




CHAPTER XIV



I


After luncheon, grinning amiably when Mrs. Abbott hinted that
Englishmen liked to be out of doors, she led Gathbroke to the confines
of the park, where they sat down under one of the oaks that reminded
him of England; for which he was in truth desperately homesick, and
never more so than at this moment.

Everything combined to make him realize uneasily his youth. In England
a man of twenty-three was a man-of-the-world if he had had the proper
opportunities; but this girl who had infatuated him, and even the far
more sympathetic Miss Dwight, made him feel that he was a mere boy; and
so had this entire family, however unwittingly.



II


He spoke of Miss Dwight suddenly, for Alexina, who had been duly
enlightened while the men were smoking with Tom, had tactfully conveyed
her sympathy, her eyes almost round with fascinated horror and
curiosity.

He set his teeth and gave a rapid but graphic account of the whole
dreadful episode, willing to interest her at any price; and Alexina,
sitting opposite on the ground, her long spine curved, her long arms
embracing her knees, listened with a breathless interest, spurring him
to potent words, even to stressing of detail.

"My goodness gracious me!" she ejaculated when he paused. "I should
have gone raving mad. You are a perfect wonder. I never heard of
anything so gor--perfectly thrilling. And that girl, what did you say
her name was?"

Gathbroke, who had purposely withheld it, said explosively:

"Dwight."

"Dwight?"

"I think she is a sister of a friend of yours." And he was made as
miserable as he could wish by a crimson tide that swept straight from
her heart pump up to her widow's peak.

"Dwight? Sister? I didn't know he had one. I saw him several times
during the fire and he didn't mention her."

"I suspect he was too absorbed." Gathbroke muttered the words, but
man's instinct of loyalty to his own sex is strong. "A city doesn't
burn every day, you know."

"Still ... what is she like? Like him?"

"I do not remember him at all ... She? Oh, she has a tremendous amount
of dark hair that looks as if falling off the top of her head and down
her face. Uncommonly heavy eyebrows, and very light gray--Ah, I have
it! I have been groping for the word ever since--sinister eyes.... That
is the effect in that dark face. She has a curious character, I should
think. Not very frank. She--well, she rather struck me as having been
born for drama; tragic drama, I am afraid."

"Not a bit like her brother. How old is she?"

"Twenty-two, she told me."

"What--what does she do? They are not a bit well off."

He hesitated a moment. "Well--as I recall it, she is studying something
or other at the University of California."

"And of course she boards down there with her brother, who takes care
of her while she is studying to be a teacher or something." Alexina
having arranged it to her satisfaction dismissed the subject. She had
no mind to betray herself to this good-looking young Englishman who had
been sent to her providentially on a very dull day. He would, no doubt,
have been frantically interesting if he had not been so idiotic as to
fall head over ears the first shot.

Still ... Alexina examined him covertly as he transferred his gaze for
a moment to the mountains across the distant bay, swimming now in a
pale blue mist with a wide banner of pale pink above them.... If she
had met him first, or had never met the other at all ... who knew?



III


Alexina, for all her passion for romance, had a remarkably level head.
She was quite aware that there had been a certain amount of
deliberation in her own headlong plunge, convinced as she was that high
romance belonged to youth alone, and fearful lest it pass her by; aware
also that a part of Dwight's halo, aside from his looks and manners and
chivalrous charm, consisted in his being a martyr to an unjust fate,
and, as such, under the ban of her august family. It was all quite too
perfect.... But if Gathbroke had come first his qualifications might
have proved quite as puissant, and no doubt Tom Abbott, who retained
his school-history hatred of the entire English race, would have
provided the opposition and perhaps influenced the family.

She swept her intoxicating lashes along the faint bloom high on her
olive cheeks and then raised her eyes suddenly to the tormented ones
opposite. She also smiled softly, alluringly, as little fascinating
wretches will who know nothing of the passions of men.

"I think you should follow Mr. Gwynne's example and stay here with us."
He thought of silver chimes and contrasted her voice with Gora Dwight's
angry contralto: he always thought of Gora in phrases. "So many
Englishmen live out here and adore it."

"I'm perfectly satisfied with my own country, thank you."

Alexina, who was feeling intensely American at the moment, curled her
lip. "Oh, of course. We have had plenty of those, too. Scarcely any of
them becomes naturalized. Just use and enjoy the country and give as
little in return as possible."

"Really? I fancy they must give rather a lot in return or they would
hardly be tolerated. No native has worked harder than Elton these last
days. I understand most of them are in business or ranching and have
married California girls."

"Oh, they have redeeming points." And then having satisfied her
curiosity as to how hazel eyes looked when angry she gave him a
dazzling smile. "We love them like brothers, and that is a proof that
we are not snobbish, for most of them are not of your or Mr. Gwynne's
class--just middle-class business people at home."

"Well, you are a business nation, so why not? I have met hardly any but
business men out here and I feel quite at home with them. My mother's
family are in trade and I enjoy myself immensely when I visit them."

"Oh!" His halo slipped.... Still, what did it matter? "I suppose you
told me that to let me know you didn't need to come out here in search
of an heiress. But many of our most charming girls are not. Just now it
seems to me that more young men in California have money than girls ...
but they are so uninteresting."

She looked pathetic, her mouth drooped; then she smiled at him
confidingly.

He knew quite as well as if he had not been hard hit that she was
flirting with him, but as long as she gave him his chance to win her
she might do her transparent little best to make a fool of him.

"Have you ever been in love?" asked Alexina softly.

"Oh, about half-way several times, but always drew back in time ...
knew it wasn't the real thing ... Youth fools itself, you know, for the
sake of the sensation--or the race. Have you?"

"Oh--" Alexina lifted her thin flexible shoulders airily and this time
her color did not flow. "How is one to tell ... a girl in her first
season ... when all men look so much alike? It is fun to flirt with
them, when you have been shut up in boarding-school and hardly had a
glimpse of life even in vacation. My New York relatives are terribly
old-fashioned. It's great fun to give one man all the dances and watch
the dado of dowagers look disapproving." And once more she gave him the
quick smile of understanding that springs so spontaneously between
youth and youth.

"Well ... you might have given all those dances to me the other night,
instead of to that fellow Dwight."

"Oh, but you see, I had already promised them to him. Lady Victoria
always comes so late."

"That's true enough." His spirits rose a trifle.

"When do you go--back to England, I mean? Not for a good long time, I
hope. We have awfully good times down here. Janet Maynard and Olive
Bascom live at San Mateo in the summer, and Aileen Lawton at
Burlingame. They are my chums and we'd give you a ripping time. We'd
like to have you take away the pleasantest possible memory of
California instead of such a terrible one. I don't mean anything very
gay of course. You mustn't think I'm heartless." And she showed the
lower pearl of her eyes and looked like a madonna.

"I'm afraid I must go soon. I've had an extension of leave already, and
Hofer told me just before we left to-day that he thought he could let
me have his private car inside of a week. They've been using it."



IV


There was not a dwelling in sight. The quiet of that old park with its
brooding oaks was primeval. Behind her was the pink and blue glory of
sky and mountain. Her eyes were like stars.

He burst out boyishly: "If I only had more time! If only I could have
met you even when I first came to San Francisco ... before ... before
... I'd--I'd like to marry you. It's fearfully soon to say such a
thing. I feel like a fool. But I'm not the first man to fall madly in
love at first sight ... and you ... you ... If I tell you now instead
of waiting it's because there's so little time. Would you ... do you
think you could marry me?"

"Oh! Ah!" (She almost said Ow.) After all it was her first proposal.
She was thrilled in spite of the fact that she was in love with another
man, for she felt close to something elemental, hazily understood ...
something in her own unsounded depths rushed to meet it.

But he was too young, and too "easy," and she didn't like his gray
flannel shirt; which, laundry being out of the question, he had bought
in Fillmore Street almost opposite the undertaker's.

"Suppose we correspond for a year? That is, if you must really go so
soon."

"I must. I want you to go with me."

His eyes had turned almost black and he had set his jaw in a way she
didn't like at all. In nerving himself to go through the ordeal he had
worked up his fermenting mind into a positively brutal mood.

"Oh--mercy! I couldn't do that. My people are the most conventional in
the world."

The situation was getting beyond her. She had not intended to make him
propose for at least a week and then he would have been abject and she
majestic. She sprang to her feet with a swift sidewise movement that
made her limp young body melt into a series of curves; and, standing at
bay as it were, looked at him with a little frown.

He rose as quickly and she liked the set of his jaw bones less and less.

"Are you refusing me outright?" he demanded. "That would be only fair,
you know, if I have no chance."

"Well.... I think so. That is--"

"Do you love another man?"

Coquetry flashed back. Nevertheless, she told the exact truth little as
she suspected it.

"I love myself, and youth, and life, and liberty. What is a man in
comparison with all that?"

"This." And before she could make another leap he had her in his arms;
and under the fire of his lips and eyes she lay inert, intoxicated, her
first flash of young passion completely responsive to his.

But only for a moment.

She wrenched herself away, her face livid, her eyes black with fury.
She beat his chest with her fists.

"You! You! How I hate you! To think I should have given that to you ...
to think that another man should have been the first to kiss me ... I'm
in love with another man, I tell you. Why don't you go? I hate myself
and I never want to lay eyes on you again. Go! Go! Go!"




CHAPTER XV



I


During the retreat from Mons and again in those black days of March,
nineteen-eighteen, Gathbroke's tormented mind snapped from the present
and flashed on its screen so startling a resurrection of himself during
those last dreadful days in San Francisco that for the moment he was
unconscious of the world crashing about him.

He saw himself in long days and nights of anguish and despair, of
embittered love and baffled passion: youth enjoying one of its divine
prerogatives and the fullness thereof!

Pacing the floor of his room on Russian Hill, tramping over the
mountains across the Bay, doggedly awaiting that sole alleviation of
mental suffering in its early stages, a change of scene.

Finally the Hofer car was placed at his disposal and he started on his
four days' journey to New York; and this brief chapter, that his
friends thought so gruesome, was the least of his afflictions. The
memory of his twenty-four hours or more of close physical association
with his sister's corpse made any subsequent adventure with the dead
seem tame. And at least he was leaving behind him a State which seemed
to have magnetized him across six thousand miles to experience the
horror and misery she had in pickle for him. He reveled in the audible
rush of the train that was carrying him farther every moment from the
girl who had cut down into the core of his heart and left her indelible
image on a remarkably good memory.



II


He had asked himself one day--it was his last in California and he had
taken his courage in his teeth and was on his way to call on Gora
Dwight at last, picking his steps through, the still smoking ruins down
to Van Ness Avenue--whether it would be possible for any man to suffer
twice in a lifetime as he had suffered since that hideous moment at
Rincona, coming as it did on top of an uncommon and terrible experience
that had racked his nerves and soul as it might not have done had he
been seasoned by war or even a few years older. At all events it had
left him with no reserves even in his pride to fight his failure and
his loss.

In that shrieking hell of August twenty-sixth, or again when lying
abandoned and gassed in a way-side hut during that ominous retreat of
the Fifth Army, when he had a sudden close vision of himself, trousers
tucked into a pair of Gwynne's hunting boots, swearing now and again as
he stepped on a hot brick; and heard his groping ego whisper the
question through his prostrate mind, he was tempted to answer aloud, to
shout "No" above the shrieking of shells and the groans of men fallen
about him.

He might no longer love Alexina Groome after twelve or even eight years
of complete severance; and, indeed, save in flashing moments like these
he had seldom thought of her after the first two or three years; but at
least she had taken the edge from his power to suffer.

He had lost his mother soon after his return with the body of her
youngest child, his father had died three years later, and he had
accepted these griefs with the composure of maturity. Although he had
had some agreeable adventures (not that he had had much time for either
women or society) he had taken devilish good care not to get in too
deep--even if he still possessed the power to love at all, which he
doubted.

He remembered also, what he had almost forgotten, that during that walk
it had come to him with the sharpness of surprise that the image of the
girl who clung to his mind with the tentacles of a devil-fish, was as
he had seen her standing under the oak tree while unaware of his
presence: older, a more dignified and thoughtful figure, a woman old
enough to be his mate in something more than youthful passion, the
ideal woman of vague sweet dreams; not as the thoughtless little
coquette who had tempted him to ruin his chances by acting like a cave
brute.

Given a fortnight longer, during which he remained master of himself
instead of a young fool with a smashed temperament, and the unfledged
woman in her, whose subtle projection he had witnessed during that
moment of his capitulation, would have recognized him as her mate; as
for the moment she had in his arms.

Not the least of his ordeals during those last days was the inevitable
call on Gora Dwight. He felt like a cad, after what she had been to him
at the end of an appalling experience, to have let, nearly three weeks
go by with no apparent recognition of her existence. But he had been
unable to find a messenger, there was no post; and then, after his
ill-starred visit to Rincona, he had forgotten her until his final
visit to the undertaker; when she had seemed to stand, an indignant and
reproachful figure, at the head of the casket.



III


He had a note in his pocket and hoped she would be out. But she opened
the door herself, and her dark face, thinner than he recalled it,
flushed and then turned pale. But she said calmly as she extended her
hand: "Come in. I wondered what had become of you." "I'm sorry.
But--perhaps--you can understand--it was not easy for me to come here!"

"Of course. Come up to my diggings."

He followed her up to the attic studio, where as before he took the
easy chair and accepted one of her cigarettes; which he professed to be
grateful for as his were exhausted and every decent brand in town had
gone up in smoke.

Gora was deeply disappointed that she had received no warning of his
call, for she possessed an extremely becoming and richly embroidered
silk Chinese costume, as red as the flames that had devoured Chinatown
a few days after she had bought it at a bankrupt sale. She had put it
on every afternoon for a week, hoping and expecting that he would call;
and now that she had on her second-best tailored suit, and a darned if
immaculate shirtwaist, he had chosen to turn, up! ... But at least the
lapels of the jacket had recently been faced with red, and it curved
closely over her beautiful bust. Moreover, she had just finished
rearranging the masses of her rich brown hair when the bell rang.

And she had him for a time, perhaps for an hour! She set out the tea
things as an intimation of the refreshment he would get at the proper
time....

She too had suffered during this past interminable fortnight, but Gora
was far more mature than the young Englishman, upon whom life until the
last few weeks had smiled so persistently. She was too complex, she had
suffered in too many ways, from too many causes, not all of them
elevating, to be capable upon so short a notice, even after a night of
unique companionship, of such whole-souled agony and despair. In her
imagination, her sense of drama, her vanity, in the fading of vague
dazzling hopes of a future to which he held the key, and perhaps a
little in her stormy heart, she had felt a degree of harsh
disappointment, but she had already half-recovered; and as she sat
looking at his ravaged face she wondered that the death of a sister, no
matter how harrowing the conditions, could make such a wreck of any man.

He told her of his difficulties in finding some one to remove the body
from the vault to the undertaker's, of the delay in obtaining a private
car, gave her some idea of his disorganized life since they had parted,
but made no mention of Alexina Groome or Rincona. Then he politely
asked her if she had any new plans for the future. Nobody seemed to
look forward to the same old life.

Gora shrugged her shoulders with a movement expressive of irritation.
"My brother, who is engaged to Alexina Groome, insists that I give up
this lodging house."

"Oh, so they are engaged?" Gathbroke lit another cigarette, and his
hand did not tremble; he felt as if his nerves had been immersed in ice
water and frozen.

"Yes--marvelously. The family, as might be expected, is furious. But
the girl is mad about him and of age. She is just a foolish child and
should be locked up. My brother is not in the least what she imagines
him. She wrote me a letter. Good heaven! One would think she had
captured the prince of a fairy tale, or the hero of an old romantic
novel. There should be a law prohibiting girls from marrying before
they are twenty-two at least.... However, the thing is done. And my
brother is terribly afraid they'll find out that I keep a lodging
house. He's given them to understand we both board here. They are prime
snobs and so is he. I never dreamed it was in him until he began to go
about in society, but then you never know what is in anybody.
Otherwise, he is harmless enough, and a good industrious boy, but he'll
never make the money to keep up with that set, and she won't have much.
It's a stupid affair all round...."

"I've refused to budge until he finds me a job. He certainly cannot
support me, even if I were willing to be supported by any one. As far
as I am concerned they could know I kept a lodging house and welcome.
It is honest and it gives me a good living; and, what I value more,
many hours of freedom. But Mortimer is not only positively terrified
they'll find it out, but he is as obstinate over it as--well, as that
kind of man always is. He's looking about, and I fancy my fate is
stenography or bookkeeping: I took a course at a business college
shortly before my mother died. I don't know that he'd like that much
better; he hinted that I might be a librarian in a small town. But I'll
be hanged if I fall for that."

Gathbroke smiled. "Not that. You don't belong to the country town. But
I fancy you'll have to give up the lodging house. Elton Gwynne took me
down the Peninsula one day, and--well--I don't fancy they would stand
for it. Aristocracies are aristocracies the world over. They may talk
democracy, and really modify themselves a bit, but there are certain
things they'd choke on if they tried to swallow them, and they won't
even try. Better give it up before they find it out and tackle you. I
don't fancy you'd stand for that. It would be devilish disagreeable.
You've got to know and be more or less intimate with them all--"

"I'll not be patronized by them. I don't know that I'll go near them.
For years I've resented that I was not one of them, but I don't fancy
tagging in after my brother, treated with pleasant courteous
resignation, invited once a year to a family dinner, and quite
forgotten on smart occasions."

"Quite so. I like your spunk. Have you thought of being a nurse? All
work is hard and I should think that would be interesting. Must meet a
jolly lot of people. You should see the becoming uniforms the London
nurses wear. Prettiest women on the street, by Jove."

Her heart sank but she replied evenly: "Not a bad idea. I've quite
enough saved to take the course comfortably--"

He had a flash of memory. "And that would give you time to win your
reputation as a writer. Then the nursing would be merely one more
resource."

"It was nice of you to remember that. I'll consider the nursing
proposition, and when you have your next war I'll go over and nurse
you. That part of it--a war nurse--would be mighty interesting."

The words were spoken idly, merely to avert a pause, and forgotten as
soon as uttered. But as a matter of fact the next time they met was
when he looked up from his cot in the hospital after he had been
retrieved from the hut by two of his devoted Tommies, and saw the odd
pale eyes of Gora Dwight close above his own.





BOOK II




CHAPTER I



I


Gora closed the door of Mrs. Groome's room as the clock struck two, the
old Ballinger clock that had seemed to toll the hours on a deep note of
solemn acquiescence for the past six weeks.

She crossed the hall and entered Alexina's room without knocking.
Mortimer, during the past fortnight, had moved from the room adjoining
his wife's to one at the back of the house, lest it should be necessary
to call Alexina in the night. He worked very hard.

Alexina still occupied her old room in the front of the house where the
creaking eucalyptus trees sometimes brushed the window pane. It had
been refurnished and fitted in various elusive shades of pink by Mrs.
Abbott as her wedding present. There was a dim point of light above a
gas jet and Gora saw that Alexina was asleep. The pillows were on the
floor. She was lying flat, her arms thrown out, the dusky fine mass of
her hair spread over the low head board. Her clear olive cheeks were
pale with sleep and her eyelashes looked like two little black clouds.

Gora watched her for a moment. Why awaken the poor child? She was
sleeping as peacefully as if that tall old clock of her forefathers had
not tolled out the last of another generation of Ballingers. Her soft
red lips were half parted.

It was now three years since her marriage but she still looked like a
very young girl. Gora always felt vaguely sorry for her although she
seemed happy enough. At all events it was quite obvious that she did
little thinking except when she remembered to wish for a baby.

Gora wore the white uniform of a nurse, and a little cap with wings on
the coronet of her heavy hair. It was a becoming costume and made her
eyes in their dark setting look less pale and cold.

She had a secret contempt for most of the old conventions but she had
given her word to awaken Alexina the moment any change occurred, and
she reluctantly shook her sister-in-law's shoulder.



II


Alexina sprang out of bed on the instant.

"Mother?" she cried. "Is she worse?"

Gora nodded.

Alexina made a dart for the door, but Gora threw a strong arm about
her. Those arms had held more than one violent man in his bed. "Better
wait," she said softly.

Alexina's body grew rigid as she slowly drew back on Gora's arm and
stared up at her. In a moment she asked in a hard steady voice: "Is my
mother dead?"

"Yes. It was very sudden. I had no time to telephone for the doctor; to
call you. She was sleeping. I was sitting beside her. Suddenly I knew
that she had stopped breathing--"

"Would you mind telephoning to Maria and Sally? Maria will never
forgive herself--but mother seemed so much better--"

"I will telephone at once. Shall I call Mortimer?"

"No. Why disturb him?"

Gora, watching Alexina, saw a curious remoteness enter the depths of
her eyes, and her own narrowed with something of her old angry
resentment. In this hour of profound sorrow, when the human heart is
quite honest, Alexina, however her conscious mind might be averted from
the fact, regarded Mortimer Dwight as an outsider, an agreeable alien
who had no permanent place in the immense permanency of the
Ballinger-Groomes. She wanted only her own family, her own inherent
sort. Sally had hastened to California as soon as her mother's illness
had been pronounced dangerous, and had stayed in the house until a week
ago when she had been ordered by the doctor to Santa Barbara to get rid
of a heavy cold on her chest. She had telegraphed the day before that
she was threatened with pneumonia, and Maria, assured that her mother
was in no immediate danger, had gone down to spend two days with her.

Possibly Alexina caught a flash from the mind of this strange and
interesting sister-in-law, for she added hastily:

"You know how hard Mortimer works, poor dear. And I do not feel in the
least like crying. I shall write telegrams to Ballinger and Geary: my
brothers, you know." (Gora ground her teeth.) "It was too sad they
could not get here, but Ballinger is in South America and Geary on a
diet. I must also write a cablegram to an old friend of mine who has
married a Frenchman, Olive de Morsigny. She was always so fond of
mother. Would you also mind telephoning to Rincona about seven?"

"I'll do all the telephoning. Go back to bed as soon as possible. It is
only a little after two." As Gora turned to leave the room Alexina put
her hand on her arm and summoned a faint sweet smile.

"I cannot tell you how grateful I am, Gora dear, how grateful we all
are. You have been simply wonderful--"

"I am a good nurse if I do say it myself," said Gora lightly. "But you
must remember there are others quite as good; and that I--".

"I know you would do your duty as devotedly by any stranger." Alexina
interrupted her with sweet insistence. "But it has been wonderful to be
able to have you, all the same. It has also given me the chance to know
you at last, and I shall never quite let you go again."

Gora, to her secret anger, had never accustomed herself to the
unswerving graciousness of these people, and all that it implied, but
her sharp mind had long since warned her that as she had neither the
position nor the training to emulate it, at least she must not betray a
sense of social inferiority by open resentment.

Her voice was deep and naturally abrupt but she achieved a fair
imitation of Alexina's sweet cordiality. "It has meant quite as much to
me, Alexina, I can assure you. And now that I am on my own and shall
have a day or two between cases I know where I shall spend them. I am
only too thankful that I graduated in time to take care of dear Mrs.
Groome. Write your telegrams and I will give them to the doctor when he
comes. I must telephone to him at once."



III


After she had gone Alexina wrote not only her telegrams and cablegrams,
but the "letters to follow." It was nearly four o'clock when she
finished. Old Dr. Maitland had not yet come and she put her bulletins
on the table in the hall.

She heard Gora moving about her mother's room and retreated into her
own. She did not want to go to her mother yet nor did she care
particularly to see Gora again, although she had certainly been very
nice and a great comfort to them all.

Alexina was quite unaware that her attitude to her sister-in-law was
one of unconsicous condescension, of a well-bred determination never to
wound the pride of a social inferior. She found Gora an "interesting
personality" and quite extraordinarily efficient.

It had been the greatest relief to all the family when that very
capable Miss Dwight--Gora, that is; one must remember--had been brought
by Dr. Maitland to take charge of the case after Mrs. Groome's cardiac
trouble became acute and she demanded constant attention.

Gora had slept in Mrs. Groome's bedroom for six weeks, relieved for
several hours of the afternoon by a member of the family or one of Mrs.
Groome's many anxious friends. It was her first case and it interested
her profoundly. Moreover, her personal devotion placed her for the
moment on a certain basis of equality with a family whose mental
processes were quite transparent to her contemptuous mind. She was
excessively annoyed with herself for still caring, but the roots were
too deep, and there had been nothing in her life during the past three
years to diminish her fierce sense of democracy as she interpreted it.

Alexina had never given a thought to her sister-in-law's psychology,
although the sensitive plates of her brain received an impression now
and again of a violent inner life behind that business-like exterior.
But she had seen little of her until lately, and during the past six
weeks her mind had been too concentrated upon her mother's sufferings
and possible danger to have any disposition for analysis.

She certainly did not feel the least need of her now. She wished,
indeed, that she had asked Aileen to remain in the house last night.
Aileen was her own age, they had been intimate since childhood, often
without the slightest regard for each other's feelings, and was more
like a sister than even dear Sally and Maria.

Suddenly she determined to go to her. She had her own latch key and
would disturb no one but Aileen. She dressed herself warmly and slipped
down stairs and out of the house.




CHAPTER II



I


The city below--the new solid city--was obliterated under a heavy fog,
pierced here and there by steeples and towers that looked like jagged
dark rocks in that white and tranquil sea.

On Angel Island and on the north shore of the bay the deep sad bells
were tolling their warning to moving craft; and from out at sea, beyond
the Golden Gate, the fog horn sent forth its long lugubrious groans.
The bells sounded muffled, so dense was the fog, and there was no other
sound in the sleeping city.

Alexina wrapped her long cloak more closely about her and pulled the
hood over her head.

As she walked slowly down the steep avenue it came to her with
something of a shock that she had not thought of her husband since she
had expressed to Gora her reluctance to disturb him.

She was doing the least conventional thing possible in leaving the
house at four o'clock in the morning to seek the sympathy of a girl
friend when any other young wife she knew (unless getting a divorce)
would have flown to her husband and wept out her sorrow in his arms.

And she had been married only three years, and found Mortimer quite as
irreproachable as ever, always kind, thoughtful, and considerate. He
assuredly would have said just the right things to her and not have
resented in the least being deprived of a few hours of rest.

On the contrary, he would no doubt resent being ignored, for not only
was he devoted to his lovely young wife but such behavior was
unorthodox, and he disliked the unorthodox exceedingly.

Well, she didn't want him and that was the end of it. He didn't fill
the present bill. She had never regretted her marriage, for he had
quite measured up to the best feats of her maiden imagination. He made
love charmingly, he was manly chivalrous and honorable, and his eager
spontaneity of manner when he arrived home at six o'clock every evening
never varied; to whatever level of flatness he might drop immediately
afterward. When they entered a ballroom or a restaurant she knew that
they made a "stunning couple" and that people commented upon their good
looks, their harmonious slenderness and inches, and contrasts in
nature's coloring.



II


Alexina, almost unconsciously, sat down on a bench under the trees. Her
mind sought the pleasant past as a brief respite from the present; she
knew that that part of her mind called heart was frozen by the
suddenness of her mother's death, and that her emotions would be fluid
a few hours hence.

They had had a simply heavenly time together until her mother's
illness. As a clerk in the family was unthinkable Mrs. Groome had lent
him the insurance on one of her burned buildings and he had started a
modest exporting and importing house, that being the only business of
which he had any knowledge. Judge Lawton and Tom Abbott had suggested
that he open an insurance office, or start himself in any business
where little capital besides office furniture was needed; as Mrs.
Groome's advisors they were averse to launching any of her moderate
fortune on a doubtful venture. But Dwight had insisted that he was more
likely to succeed in a business he understood than in one of which he
knew nothing, and Mrs. Groome had agreed with him. Judge Lawton and
Abbott paid over the insurance money with the worst grace possible.

And then Mortimer had a piece of the most astounding good luck. His
aunt Eliza Goring had left stock in a mine which had run out of pay ore
soon after her investment, and shut down. It had recently been
recapitalized and a new vein discovered. Mrs. Goring's executor had
sold her stock for something under twenty thousand dollars, delivering
the proceeds, as directed in her will, to two of her amazed heirs,
Mortimer and Gora Dwight.

Gora had been opposed to her brother leaving the firm of Cheever
Harrison and Cheever, where, beyond question, he would be head of a
department in time and safely anchored for life; but he had taken the
step, and she reasoned that he must have a considerable knowledge of a
business with which he had been associated for fourteen years, she knew
his energy and powers of application, and she resented the attitude of
"the family." Appreciating what his triumph would mean to him she had
consented to invest her inheritance in his business and enable him to
make immediate restitution to Mrs. Groome. As a matter of fact his
"stock did go up" with the family, particularly as he seemed to be
doing well and had the rep

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