"You cannot understand," sobbed Mrs. Groome. "This is my city! The city of
my youth; the city my father helped to make the great and wonderful city
it is. Even your father--he may not have been a good husband--Oh, no! Not
he!--but he was a good citizen; he helped to drag San Francisco out of the
political mire more than once. And now it is going! It has always been
prophesied that San Francisco would burn to the ground some time, and now
the time has come. I feel it in my bones."
This was the first reference other than perfunctory, that Alexina had ever
heard her mother make to her father, who had died when she was ten. The
girl realized abruptly that this elderly parent who, while uniformly kind,
had appeared to be far above the ordinary weaknesses of her sex, had an
inner life which bound her to the plane of mere mortals. She had a sudden
vision of an unhappy married life, silently borne, a life of suppressions,
bitter disappointments. Her chief compensation had been the unwavering
pride which had made the world forget to pity her.
And it was the threatened destruction of her city that had beaten down the
defenses and given her youngest child a brief glimpse of that haughty but
shivering spirit.
VI
Alexina's mind, in spite of a great deal of worldly garnering with an
industrious and investigating scythe, was as immature as her years, for
she had felt little and lived not at all.
Pages:
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28