"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.
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