Their wealth might be moderate but it was
solid and steadfast.
II
The entertaining of the Abbotts, Yorbas, Hathaways, Montgomerys, Brannans,
Trennahans, and others of what Alexina irreverently called the A.A., had
always been ostentatiously simple, albeit a butler and a staff of maids had
contributed to their excessive comfort. In the eighties, evening toilettes
during the summer were considered immoral; but by degrees, as time tooled
in its irresistible modernities, they gradually fell into the habit of
wearing out their winter party gowns at the evening diversions of the
country season. Burlingame, that borough of concentrated opulence founded
in the early nineties as a fashionable colony, began its career with
a certain amount of simplicity; but its millions increased to tens of
millions; and what in heaven's name, as Mrs. Clement Hunter, a leader and
an individual, once remarked, is the use of having money if you don't dress
and entertain as you would dream of dressing and entertaining if you didn't
have a cent?
Mrs. Hunter, who had formed an incongruous and somewhat hostile alliance
with Mrs. Abbott, knew that her valuable friend, like others of that "small
and early" band, resented the fact that their standards no longer counted
outside of their own set. Mrs. Abbott had turned a haughty shoulder to Mrs.
Hunter for a time, for she remembered her as, in their school days, the
socially obscure Lidie McKann; now, however, her husband turning all he
touched to gold, she had, incredibly, become one of the most important
women in San Francisco and Burlingame.
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