had been driven
out of politics some years since--preferred the more central comforts of
a hotel when he visited San Francisco. Two old family servants were
sunning themselves in the garden. The window-curtains were presumably
packed in camphor, and the dim panes suggested a cobwebbed and desolate
interior. Gwynne glanced across the ugly shabby but teeming valley to
the symbols of stupendous energies concentrated on its edge, and the
variegated magnificence of the hills, piling like roughly terraced
cliffs above it; then west to the mountains by the sea, green, unclaimed
by man as yet, although the dead were thick on the hills just below. It
was a city struggling out of chaos, but perhaps more interesting than it
would be a century hence, when it had fulfilled its destiny and become a
great metropolis of white marble and stone. A century? Nowhere had era
succeeded era with such startling rapidity, nowhere in one short
half-century had the genus American passed through so many phases. The
evidences were all before him. Once again he had the impression of
standing in the presence of hoary age--ugly premature age--was that the
secret of the vague suggestion of an unthinkable antiquity that so often
rose like a ghost in his mind?

The girls announced that they should ride back, and they walked over and
took a Third Street car. It was almost empty when they entered, but was
invaded at the next corner by a belated pleasure party bound for the
Park, a noisy disreputable crowd of flashy men, and girls with bold
tired eyes, a thick coat of the white paint which has made the fortune
of the San Francisco chemist, and gaudy cheap attire. Known in the
vernacular as "chippies," they bore a crude Western resemblance to the
Parisian grisette, and what they lacked in style they made up in sound.
They were the class that monopolized boats and trains on Sundays,
screaming steadily through the tunnels, and returned late, no longer
happy because no longer able to make a noise. One of the young women
pointed a finger at Gwynne, screaming, "I choose you!" and plumped
herself on his lap, to the suppressed delight of Isabel and Miss
Montgomery. But Gwynne looked blankly at her ill-buttoned back and the
immense buckle of her belt, while the rest of the party, those that sat
and those that swung to and fro at the straps, mocked her for choosing
so unresponsive a knight. The car stopped to accommodate another relay,
and Gwynne by a deft movement