bout little things."

"Allight, missee."

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 Magdalena, Helena, Tiny, and Ila were hardly known by sight outside
the Menlo Park set. Magdalena 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 hi