The heat was overpowering (she bathed her face constantly from the pitcher)
and the roar of the flames, the constant explosions of dynamite, the loud
vicious crackling of wood, the rending and splitting of masonry, the hoarse
impact of walls as they met the earth, was the scene's wild orchestral
accompaniment and, despite underlying apprehension and horror, gave Gora
one of the few pleasurable sensations of her life.
But she moved her chair after a moment and fixed her gaze, no longer rapt
but ironic, on the flaming hillcrests, the long line of California Street,
nucleus of the wealth and fashion of San Francisco. The Western Addition
was fashionable and growing more so, but it had been too far away for the
pioneers of the fifties and sixties, the bonanza kings of the seventies,
the railroad magnates of the eighties, and they had built their huge and
hideous mansions upon the hill that rose almost perpendicularly above the
section where they made and lost their millions. Some wag or toady had
named it Nob Hill and the inhabitants had complacently accepted the title,
although they refrained from putting it on their cards. And now it was in
flames.
II
Gora recalled the day when she had walked slowly past those mansions,
staring at each in turn as she assimilated the disheartening and
infuriating fact that she and the children that inhabited them belonged to
different worlds.
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