The Sisters-In-Law | Page 3

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