The Sisters-In-Law

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.”