VI
The local intelligenzia, those that assured one another how great were each
and all, and whose poems or stories found an occasional hospitality in the
eastern magazines, who toiled over "precious" paragraphs of criticism or
whose single achievement had been a play for the mid-summer jinks of the
Bohemian Club; these and their associates, the artists and sculptors, still
held aloof, more and more annoyed that Gora Dwight should have had the bad
taste to be discovered by the Philistines, and should be flying across the
high heavens in spite of their tabu.
Gora had gradually become aware of their existence, and their attitude,
which both amused and piqued her. She knew now that if she had been one of
them they would have beaten the big drum and proclaimed to the world (of
California) that she was "great," "a genius," the legitimate successor of
Ambrose Bierce, whom she remotely resembled, and Bret Harte, whom she
did not resemble at all. This they would have done if only to prove that
California no longer "knocked" as in the mordant nineties, nor waited for
the anile East to set the seal of its dry approval before discovering that
a new volcano was sending forth its fiery swords in their midst.
But it was extremely doubtful if society and upper club circles would have
taken any notice of her. Both had acquired the habit, however unjustly, of
regarding their local intelligenzia (with the exception of the few who kept
themselves wholly apart from all groups) as worshipers of small gods,
and preferred to take their cues from London or New York.
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