The Californians by Atherton Gertrude Franklin Horn

Author:Atherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn [Horn, Atherton, Gertrude Franklin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2007-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

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III

The night of Mrs. Yorba's long-heralded ball had arrived at last. For weeks Society had been keenly expectant, for its greatest heiress and its three most beautiful girls were to come forth from the seclusion in which they were supposed to have been cultivating their minds, into the great world of balls, musicales, and teas, where their success would be in inverse ratio to their erudition.

Rose and Caro had arrived the winter before, and were no longer "buds;" but Magdaléna, Helena, Tiny, and Ila were hardly known by sight outside the Menlo Park set. Magdaléna had never hung over the banisters at her mother's parties. The others had been abroad so long that the most exaggerated stories of their charms prevailed.

The old beaux knotted their white ties with trembling fingers and thought of the city's wild young days when Nina Randolph, Guadalupe Hathaway, Mrs. Hunt Maclean, two of the "Three Macs," and the sinuous wife of Don Pedro Earle had set their pulses humming. They were lonely old bachelors, many of them, living at the Union or the Pacific Club, and they sighed as the memories rose. That was a day when every other woman in society was a great beauty, and as full of fascination as a fig of seeds. To-day beautiful women in San Francisco's aristocracy were rare. In Kearney Street, on a Saturday afternoon, one could hardly walk for the pretty painted shop-girls; and in that second stratum which was led by the wife of a Bonanza king who had been pronounced quite impossible by Mrs. Yorba and other dames of the ancient aristocracy, there were many stunningly handsome girls. They could be met at the fashionable summer resorts; they were effulgent on first nights; they were familiar in Kearney Street on other afternoons than Saturday, and their little world was gay in its way; but Society, that exclusive body which owned its inchoation and later its vitality and coherence to that brilliant and elegant little band of women who came, capable and experienced, to the fevered ragged city of the early Fifties, still struggled in the Eighties to preserve its traditions, and did not admit the existence of these people; feminine curiosity was not even roused to the point of discussion. One day Mrs. Washington met one of the old beaux, Ben Sansome by name, on the summit of California Street hill, which commands one of the finest views of a city swarming over an hundred hills.

Mrs. Washington waved her hand at the large region known as South San Francisco.

"I suppose," she said thoughtfully, "that there are a lot of people in San Francisco whose names we have never heard."

"I suppose so!" he exclaimed.

"I wonder what they are like? How many people are there in San Francisco, anyhow?"

"About three hundred thousand."

"Really? really?" and Mrs. Washington shrugged her pretty shoulders and dismissed the subject from her mind.

Would these new beauties compare with that galaxy of long ago? was the thought that danced between Ben Sansome's faded eyes and his mirror.

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