nd frequently
spent the afternoon practising on her violin, or driving, or walking
with the Parker girls and Florence Frost, who hardly recognized the
existence of Grace Hawkes and the Monroes. The one bank in Monroe was
the Frost and Parker Bank; there were Frost Street and Parker Street,
the Frost Building and the Parker Building. May and Ida Parker and
Florence Frost had gone to Miss Bell's Private School when they were
little, and then to Miss Spencer's School in New York.

But even all this might not have accounted for the exclusive social
instincts of the young ladies if both families had not been very rich.
As it was, with prosperous fathers and ambitious mothers, with
well-kept, old-fashioned homes, pews in church, allowances of so many
hundred dollars a year, horses to ride and drive, and servants to wait
upon them, the three daughters of these two prominent families
considered themselves as obviously better than their neighbours, and
bore themselves accordingly. Cyrus Frost and Graham Parker had come to
California as young men, in the seventies; had cast in their lot with
little Monroe, and had grown rich with the town. It was a credit to the
state now; they had found it a mere handful of settlers' cabins, with
one stately, absurd mansion standing out among them, in a plantation of
young pepper and willow and locust and eucalyptus trees.

This was the home of Malcolm Monroe, turreted, mansarded, generously
filled with the glass windows that had come in a sailing vessel around
the Horn. Incongruous, pretentious, awkward, it might to a discerning
eye have suggested its owner, who was then not more than thirty years
old; a tall, silent, domineering man. He was reputed rich, and Miss
Elizabeth--or "Lily"--Price, a pretty Eastern girl who visited the
Frosts in the winter of 1878, was supposed to be doing very well for
herself when she married him, and took her bustles and chignons, her
blonde hair with its "French twist," and her scalloped, high-buttoned
kid shoes to the mansion on North Main Street.

Now the town had grown to several hundred times its old size; schools,
churches, post-office, shops, a box factory, a lumber yard, and a
winery had come to Monroe. There was the Town Hall, a plain wooden
building, and, at the shabby outskirts of South Main Street, a jail.
The Interurban Trolley "looped" the town once every hour.

All these had helped to make Cyrus Frost and Graham Parker rich. They,
like Malcolm M