Sleeping Fires: A Novel | Page 3

her retirement on this occasion was timed to finish on the morning
of her reception and had not the least misgiving that her doors would
still be closed.
The great double parlors of her new mansion were thrown into one and
the simple furniture covered with gray rep was pushed against soft gray
walls hung with several old portraits in oil, ferrotypes and silhouettes.
A magnificent crystal chandelier depended from the high and lightly
frescoed ceiling and there were side brackets beside the doors and the
low mantel piece. Mrs. McLane may not have been able to achieve
beauty with the aid of the San Francisco shops, but at least she had
managed to give her rooms a severe and stately simplicity, vastly
different from the helpless surrenders of her friends to mid-victorian
deformities.
The rooms filled early. Mrs. McLane stood before the north windows
receiving her friends with her usual brilliant smile, her manner of high
dignity and sweet cordiality. She was a majestic figure in spite of her
short stature and increasing curves, for the majesty was within and her

head above a flat back had a lofty poise. She wore her prematurely
white hair in a tall pompadour, and this with the rich velvets she
affected, ample and long, made her look like a French marquise of the
eighteenth century, stepped down from the canvas. The effect was by
no means accidental. Mrs. McLane's grandmother had been French and
she resembled her.
Her hoopskirt was small, but the other women were inclined to the
extreme of the fashion; as they saw it in the Godey's Lady's Book they
or their dressmakers subscribed to. Their handsome gowns spread
widely and the rooms hardly could have seemed to sway and undulate
more if an earthquake had rocked it. The older women wore small
bonnets and cashmere shawls, lace collars and cameos, the younger
fichus and small flat hats above their "waterfalls" or curled chignons.
The husbands had retired with Mr. McLane to the smoking room, but
there were many beaux present, equally expectant when not too
absorbed.
Unlike as a reception of that day was in background and costumes from
the refinements of modern art and taste, it possessed one contrast that
was wholly to its advantage. Its men were gentlemen and the sons and
grandsons of gentlemen. To no one city has there ever been such an
emigration of men of good family as to San Francisco in the Fifties and
Sixties. Ambitious to push ahead in politics or the professions and
appreciating the immediate opportunities of the new and famous city,
or left with an insufficient inheritance (particularly after the war) and
ashamed to work in communities where no gentleman had ever worked,
they had set sail with a few hundreds to a land where a man, if he did
not occupy himself lucratively, was unfit for the society of enterprising
citizens.
Few had come in time for the gold diggings, but all, unless they had
disappeared into the hot insatiable maw of the wicked little city, had
succeeded in one field or another; and these, in their dandified clothes,
made a fine appearance at fashionable gatherings. If they took up less
room than the women they certainly were more decorative.
Dr. Talbot and his wife had not arrived. To all eager questions Mrs.

McLane merely replied that "they" would "be here." She had the
dramatic instinct of the true leader and had commanded the doctor not
to bring his bride before four o'clock. The reception began at three.
They should have an entrance. But Mrs. Abbott, a lady of three chins
and an eagle eye, who had clung for twenty-five years to black satin
and bugles, was too persistent to be denied. She extracted the
information that the Bostonian had sent her own furniture by a previous
steamer and that her drawing room was graceful, French, and exquisite.
At ten minutes after the hour the buzz and chatter stopped abruptly and
every face was turned, every neck craned toward the door. The colored
butler had announced with a grand flourish:
"Dr. and Mrs. Talbot."
The doctor looked as rubicund, as jovial, as cynical as ever. But few
cast him more than a passing glance. Then they gave an audible gasp,
induced by an ingenuous compound of amazement, disappointment,
and admiration. They had been prepared to forgive, to endure, to make
every allowance. The poor thing could no more help being plain and
dowdy than born in Boston, and as their leader had satisfied herself that
she "would do," they would never let her know how deeply they
deplored her disabilities.
But they found nothing to deplore but the agonizing necessity for
immediate readjustment. Mrs. Talbot was unquestionably a product of
the best society. The South could have done