The house had as little pretensions to architectural beauty as others
of its era, but it was a large compact structure of some thirty rooms,
exclusive of the servants' quarters, and with as many outbuildings as a
Danish, farm. Long French windows opened upon a wide piazza, whose pillars
had disappeared long since under a luxuriant growth of rose vines and
wistaria. At its base was a bed of Parma violets, whose fragrance a
westerly breeze wafted to the end of the avenue a quarter of a mile away.
All about the house, breaking the smooth lawns, were beds and trees of
flowers, at this time of the year a glowing exotic mass of color; but in
the park that made up the greater part of the estate exclusive of the
farms, the grass under the superb oaks was merely clipped, the weeds
and undergrowth removed. The oaks had been evenly shorn of their lower
branches, which gave them a formal and somewhat arrogant expression, as of
cardinals and kings lifting their skirts.
Alexina hated the enormous rooms with their high frescoed ceilings and
heavy Victorian furniture; but Maria Abbott loved and revered the old
house, emblem that it was of a secure proud family that had defied that
detestable (and disturbing) old phrase: "Three generations from shirt
sleeves to shirt sleeves." The Abbotts, like the Ballingers and Groomes
and Gearys and many others of that ilk, had not come to California in the
fifties and sixties as adventurers, but with all that was needed to give
them immediate prestige in the new community; and, among those that still
retained their estates in the San Mateo Valley, at least, there was as
little prospect of their reversion to shirt sleeves as of their conversion
to the red shirt of socialism.
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