Never, so James told her, since her Grandmother Ballinger's reign, had
there been such life and movement in the old house. All Mrs. Groome's
intimate friends and many of Alexina's came to it, some to make kindly
inquiries, others to beg them to leave the city, many to gossip and
exchange experiences of that fateful morning; a few from Rincon Hill and
the old ladies' fashionable boarding-house district to claim shelter until
they could make their way to relatives out of town.
Mrs. Groome welcomed her friends not only with the more spontaneous
hospitality of an older time but in that spirit of brotherhood that
every disaster seems to release, however temporarily. Brotherhood is
unquestionably an instinct of the soul, an inheritance from that sunrise
era when mutual interdependence was as imperative as it was automatic. The
complexities of civilization have overlaid it, and almost but not wholly
replaced it by national and individual selfishness. But the world as yet is
only about one-third civilized. Centuries hence a unified civilization may
complete the circle, but human nature and progress must act and react a
thousand times before the earthly millenium; and it cannot be hastened by
dreamers and fanatics.
All Mrs. Groome's spare rooms were placed at the service of her friends,
and cots were bought in the humble Fillmore Street shops and put up in the
billiard room, the double parlors, the library and the upper hall.
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