The Sisters-In-Law | Page 2

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