The eyes were a light cold gray, oval and far apart. Her nose
was short and strong and had the same cohibitive expression as the straight
sharply-cut mouth--when not ironic or smiling. Her teeth were beautiful.
She had put on her best tailored suit and he saw that her "figger" was good
although too short and full for his taste. He liked the long and stately
slenderness that his own centuries had bred. But her hands and well-shod
feet were narrow if not small, and he decided that she just escaped
possessing what modern slang so aptly expressed as "class," Possibly it was
the defiance in her square chin, the almost angry poise of her head, that
betrayed her as an unwilling outsider.
"Bad luck!" he asked sympathetically.
She gave him a brief outline of her family history, overemphasizing
as Americans will--those that lay any claim to descent--the previous
importance of the Dwights and the Mortimers in Utica, N.Y. Incidentally,
she gave him a flashlight picture of the social conditions in San
Francisco.
He was intensely interested. "Really! I should have said there would be the
complete democracy in California if anywhere. Of course no Englishman of my
generation expects to find San Franciscans in cowboy costume; but I must
say I was astonished at the luxury and fashion not only at those Southern
California hotels, where, to be sure, most of the guests are from your
older Eastern states, but at that ball Lady Victoria took me to.
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