Mrs. Bode was one of those astonishing Americans who, often with no social affiliations whatever, even in their native city, or living on the very edges of civilization, have yet so wide and accurate a knowledge of the cardinal families of the various capitals of the world, that they would be invaluable in the offices of Burke, Debrett, and the Almanach de Gotha. Whether this enterprising variety of the genus Americana invests in these valuable works of reference, or merely studies them in the public libraries, ourselves would not venture to state; but that is beside the question; some highly specialized magnet in their brains has accumulated the knowledge, and less ambitious Americans, even aristocratic foreigners, are often humbled by them when floundering conversationally among the ramifications of the peerages of Europe. These students, if New Yorkers, take no interest in the “first families” of any state in the American Union save their own, but if a malignant chance has deposited them on what stage folk call “the road,” then are their mental woodsheds stored with the family trees of their own state, and New York. Never of any other state: Washington is “too mixed”; Boston is “obsolete”; Chicago is “too new for any use”; San Francisco is too picturesque to be aristocratic; the South can take care of itself; and the rest of the country, with the possible exception of Philadelphia, would never presume to enter the discussion.

Nor is this the extent of their knowledge. They can talk fluently about all the great dressmakers and milliners that dwell in the centres of fashion, and even of those so exclusive as to cater only to the best-bred Americans, and they are always the first to appear in the new style, even though they have no place to show it but the street. Moreover, they know every scandal in Europe, scandals of aristocrats and prime donne, that no newspaper has ever scented. They discuss the great and the famous of the world as casually as their own acquaintance, dropping titles and other formalities in a manner that bespeaks a keen and secret pleasure that the less gifted or less energetic mortal may sigh for in vain.

Mrs. Bode came of good pioneer stock, her sturdy Kansas grandfather, Daniel Tay, having been among the first to brave the hardships of the emigrant trail and make “his pile” in California. Not that he made it in one picturesque moment. He was only moderately lucky in the mines. But he could make pies, and miners were willing to pay little bags of gold-dust for them. He set up a shop for rough-and-ready clothing in Sacramento, with a pie counter under the awning. At all times he made a handsome income, and when the miners came trooping in drunk and reckless, he cleaned up almost as much as the gambling-houses.

In due course, he migrated to San Francisco, and, abandoning a plebeian method of livelihood of which his wife had learned to disapprove, embarked in a commission business including hardware and groceries. In those wild and fluctuating days he made and lost several fortunes. When his son, Daniel Second, grew up, he was a fairly prosperous merchant, with connections in Central America and China. His coffee, spices, teas, and such other delicacies as even the renowned California soil refused to produce were the best on the market; and had it not been for the old gaming fever in his blood, which sent him on periodic sprees into the stock-market, he would have accumulated a large fortune and permitted his wife and daughters to assist in the making of San Francisco’s aristocracy. But they were always being either burned out or sold out of their fine new houses, and Mrs. Tay died a disappointed woman. The Southerners held the social fort and she had never crossed its threshold. To be sure, she had washed the miners’ overalls in the rear of the Sacramento store while the pies were being devoured in front, but ancient history is made very rapidly in California, and there were signs that several no better than herself were “getting their wedge in.”

Mr. Tay soon followed his wife into the imposing vault on Lone Mountain, but not before adjuring his son to “let stocks alone.” The advice was unnecessary, for Daniel Second was a shrewd cautious man, immune from every temptation the fascinating city of San Francisco could offer. He put the business he had inherited on a sure foundation, rebuilt modestly whenever he was burned out, and was impervious to the laments of his pretty second wife that they were “nobodies.” Mrs. Tay felt that heaven had endowed her with that talent most envied of women, the social, but her husband was more than content to be a nobody so long as his financial future was secure; and it was not until his oldest daughter, Charlotte,—or “Cherry” as she was fondly called,—came home from boarding-school for the last time, that he was persuaded to buy a large and hideous “residence” with a mansard roof, a cupola, and bow-windows, suddenly thrown on the market by a disappearing capitalist, and “splurge a bit.”

The splurging carried them but a short distance. St. Mary’s Hall, Benicia, where Cherry had received the last of her education, was an aristocratic institution, and she had made some good friends among the girls. But although they came to her first party, and she was asked now and again to large entertainments at their homes, it was more than patent that the Tays were not “in it.” There was no reason in the world why they should not be, for they were not even “impossible” (as the old folks had been); but whether Mrs. Tay was less gifted socially than she had fancied, or people so long out of it were regarded with suspicion or cold indifference by the venerable holders of the social fort, or Tay’s modest fortune was not worth while, in view of the enormous fortunes that had been made recently in the railroads and the Nevada mines, and “Society was already large enough,” certain it is that Mrs. Tay and her step-daughter spent long days in the library of their big house in the Western Addition, consoling themselves with books (and who shall say that Burke and the Almanach de Gotha were not among them?) or “the finest view in the world.”

This unhappy state of affairs lasted for two years, and then Cherry had an inspiration. One of her father’s friends was the owner of a powerful newspaper, and he had a friend as powerful as himself in the state whence came the present Minister to the Court of St. James. Armed with letters from these two makers and unmakers of reputations, Cherry took her mother to London and requested to be presented at court. The request was granted, and this great event, as well as their subsequent adventures in the most good-natured society in the world, were cabled to the San Francisco newspapers.

Mr. Tay had snorted in disgust when the plan was unfolded to him, but had yielded to sulks, tears, and hysterics. One season, however, was all he would finance; but his wife and daughter, although they had hoped to remain abroad for two years, returned with the less reluctance as they were now “names” in the inhospitable city of their birth. These names had been embroidered for four months with royalty, a few of the best titles in Burke, and many of the lesser. (“Precious few will know the difference,” said Cherry, scornfully.)

Their position, as a matter of fact, was somewhat improved; Cherry was admitted to the sacred Assemblies, and people allowed themselves to admire her Parisian gowns, her pretty face, and refined vivacious manner. At the end of the season she captured the son of one of the new great millionnaires. The Tays had arrived. The past was forgotten by themselves if not by other walking blue books, that fine scavenger element in Society which allowed no one permanently to sink “pasts,” ages, ancestral pies, saloons, brothels, wash-tubs, or any of the humble but honest beginnings which fain would repose beneath the foundations of San Francisco. But the Tays, like many another, fancied their past forgotten, whatever the fate of their neighbors; and, as a matter of fact, they were now so firmly established that three divorces could not have dislodged them. Mrs. Bode, in her superb mansion on Nob Hill, forged ahead so steadily that she enjoyed excellent prospects of being a Society Queen, when the old guard should have died off, and Mrs. Tay had stuccoed her house, shaved off the bow-windows, flattened the roof, replaced rep and damask with silks and tapestries, and both were happy women.

All this may sound contemptible to those that enjoy a proper scorn of Society; but it must be remembered that as the world is at present constituted, women, not forced to work for their living, and born without talent, have little outlet for their energies. And of these energies they often have as full a supply as men. Besides, they don’t know any better.

Mrs. Bode was thirty-two at the time the Tay family entered Julia’s life, and although she had been abroad many times since her marriage, this was the first visit of her younger brother and sister; Mr. Tay “having no use for Europe and the Californians who were always running about in it when they had the finest slice of God’s own country to live in.” But Mrs. Bode was an avowed enemy of the “provincial point of view,” and justly prided herself upon being one of the most cosmopolitan women in San Francisco society. She was determined that her little half-sister, to whom she was devoted, having no children of her own, should enjoy all the advantages she so sadly had lacked, and Dan’s obstreperous Americanism had “tired” her. So, for the last eight months, with or without the amiable Mr. Bode, and in spite of cables from pa, who wished Daniel Third to finish his education as quickly as possible and enter the firm, she had piloted her charges through ruins, picture galleries, cities ancient and modern, museums, and mountain landscapes; besides forcing them to study French and German two hours a day with travelling tutors; until Emily yawned in the face of everything, and Dan threatened to cable to his father for funds and return by himself. But Mrs. Bode, whose own leave of absence was expiring, held them well in hand, and announced her intention of bringing them over every summer. This program she carried out as far as Emily was concerned, but it was fifteen years before Daniel Tay found time or inclination to leave his native land again.

Their reception at the castle was all that Julia could have wished. Mrs. Winstone was delighted to see them, Mrs. Bode being impeccable in her critical eyes inasmuch as she had no accent, did not flaunt her riches, and was never so aggressively well dressed that she made an Englishwoman feel dowdy. If she had been told of the Sacramento store, with the pies in front and the wash-tubs behind, it would not have affected her judgment in the least. She would have replied that all Americans had some such origin; and nothing amused her more than their ancestral pretensions. “New is new, and republics are republics,” she said once to Mrs. Macmanus, when discussing a grande dame from New York. “What silly asses they are to talk ‘family’ in Europe! We like some and we don’t others, and that’s all there is to it.”

As neither painted, she and Mrs. Bode kissed each other warmly, and, the American having had her fill of ruins long since, they went off to a comfortable fireside to gossip, leaving Emily and Daniel to Julia. The little girl was openly rebellious, when ordered to investigate the ruined portion of the castle, but Daniel would have followed Julia straight out into the North Sea. He had never been insensible to the charm of girls, but here was a goddess, and he proceeded to worship her in the whole-hearted fashion of fifteen, and with an enthusiasm the more possessing as it knew no guile.

They wandered through old rooms and passages, under and over ground, ivy-draped and stark, Julia recounting the castle’s many histories. Emily lagged behind and wilfully closed her ears. Finally, having emerged upon the flat roof of a tower, she saw that she could find her way back to the garden without getting lost, announced her intention curtly, and ran down the spiral stair.

“Good riddance,” said her brother, as he and Julia sat down to rest. “But I don’t blame her. This is the last dinky old castle that I look at this trip. America for me, anyhow. Don’t think I’m a Western savage—that is what Cherry calls me—it’s awfully good of you to climb round like this and spiel off such a lot, and this really is the dandiest castle I’ve seen. But I’ve been dragged through about a hundred, and as for pictures—wow! They can only be counted by miles. I’ll never look at another as long as I live. Give me chromos, anyhow. We have some in the garret at home, and I like them better than the old masters—got some color and go in them, and not so much religion.”

Julia laughed outright. She thought him a young barbarian, but refreshing as the crystal water of a spring after too much old burgundy—this simile inspired by memory of the army of aristocrats she had met since her arrival in England. These gentlemen, most of them splendid to look at, were either formal and correct even when most languid, or bit their ideas out in slang, giving the impression that they thought in slang, dreamed in slang, indubitably made love in it; but it was a slang, which, loose and ugly as it might be, often meaningless, seemed to cry “hands off” to all without the pale. Some were affected, but all of these were affected in precisely the same way. Each and every one was full of an inherited wisdom which betrayed itself in manner and certain rigid mental attitudes, even where brain was lacking. To Julia, at this moment, they seemed in an advanced stage of petrifaction. Even Nigel was a grandfather in comparison with this bright green shoot from the new world. And Julia warmed to his frank admiration. The men to whom she had done duty as hostess since the 15th of September had paid her little or no attention. They were interested in some one else, they found her too young, they were too tired for flirtation after a long day with the guns, or they were wary about “poaching on the preserves of a cad like France. He had a look in his eye at times that would warn any man off.”

Whatever the cause, Julia, whose natural feminine instinct for conquest had been awakened during her brief season in London while she was still a girl, and who missed Nigel’s adoration, was willing to accept her due at the hands of fifteen, nothing better offering. Besides, the boy amused her, and she was seldom amused these days.

“Tell me more about California,” she said; and under a rapid fire of questions Dan artlessly revealed the history of his family (he was very proud of it), and, incidentally, told her much of the social peculiarities of his city. It was a strange story to Julia, who knew nothing of young civilizations, and was profoundly imbued with a respect for aristocracies. She felt that she should place this young scion of a quite terrible family somewhere between the steward of Bosquith and Mr. Leggins; but when she looked squarely into that open ingenuous fearless almost arrogant face, the face of an intelligent boy born in a land whose theory is equality, and in whose short life poverty and snubs had played no part, she found herself accepting him as an equal. His face had not the fine high-bred beauty of Nigel’s nor the mathematical regularity of her husband’s, but the eyes were keener, the brow was larger and fuller, the mouth more mobile than any she knew; and these divergencies fascinated her. But she drew herself apart in some resentment as he asked her abruptly:—

“What does your husband do for a living?”

“Do—why, nothing.”

“Nothing? Great Scott! What sort of a man is he? When American men don’t work, even if they have money, we despise them. They generally have to, anyhow. If they inherit money they have to work to hang on to it. Some of them drink themselves to death, but they don’t count.”

Julia had colored haughtily, but wondered at her eagerness in exclaiming: “My husband was in the navy, but he has resigned and is now a member of Parliament.”

“Well, that’s doing something, but not much. I remember, now, Cherry told me he’s going to be a duke. Then, I suppose, he’ll do nothing at all.”

“Oh, yes, dukes have to look after their estates; they don’t leave everything to their stewards; they take a paternal interest in the tenantry; sometimes they are magistrates, and sometimes they go to the House of Lords.”

“Well, that’s just playing with life, to my mind,” said young Tay, with conviction. “A man isn’t a man who doesn’t earn his keep and make his pile. I’m almost sorry my father is well off: I’d like to make my own fortune. But there’s this satisfaction; if I don’t work as hard as he does, when my time comes, I’ll be a beggar fast enough. Competition’s awful; and even people that do nothing but cut coupons for a living often get stuck. People are rich to-day and poor to-morrow, when they’re not sharp. Makes life interesting. But just living on ancestral acres—Gee! I’d die of old age before I was twenty-five.”

“I wonder if that is the way Ishbel felt?” murmured Julia, thoughtfully. Ishbel’s sudden departure from the tenets of her class had astounded her, and, in spite of explanations, she was puzzled yet.

“Ishbel?”

“Lady Ishbel Jones. She is the daughter of a poor Irish peer, and married a very rich City man. After five years of society and pleasure—she is beautiful and charming—she suddenly decided she wanted to make money herself and opened a hat shop in Bond Street. She would just suit you.”

But young Tay frowned and shook his head vigorously. “Not a bit of it. Women were not made to work, but to be worked for. If I had my way, every man should be made to support all his poor women relations, and if the women hadn’t any men relations, then I’d have the other men taxed to support them. It makes me sick seeing girls going to work in the morning when I am starting for my ride in the Park. And a rich man to let his wife work! I call that downright disgusting.”

Julia, much to her astonishment, resented this speech. “That’s tyranny of another kind. Women are not dolls. You talk like a Turk.”

“Turk? Dolls!” He arose in his wrath. “I’d have you know that American women do just about as they please, and American men are famous for letting them.” He added, with his natural honesty: “Some are strict and old-fashioned, like my father, but nobody could say he wasn’t generous. And what I told you is the reputation of American men, anyhow.”

“Well, sit down again, please. I am surprised. I thought you would respect Ishbel.”

“Not I. She’ll spoil her looks, and then where’ll she be?”

Julia, in a moment of prescience, asked with a mixture of wistfulness and disdain, “Do you care so much for mere beauty?”

“Betcherlife. I hate ugliness, and I love pretty girls. We have them in San Francisco by wholesale. To be ugly is a crime out there. I intend to marry the prettiest I can find just as soon as I’m old enough.”

“And some day—when she loses her youth and beauty?”

“Oh, I’ll love her just the same, for she’ll be my wife, and I’ll be old myself then, and have nothing to say. But I’ll have had the pick. I intend to have the pick of everything going.”

“Going?”

“In life. I must teach you our slang. English slang has no sense.”

“I fancy I could understand you better if you did. But I’ve seen men whose wives were once young and pretty, and who are always after some beauty twenty years younger than themselves—thirty—forty—”

Then she blushed, feeling that such a display of worldly knowledge was a desecration in the presence of fifteen summers.

But young Tay answered indifferently: “Oh, we’ve plenty of those at home. The bald heads always make the worst fools of themselves. But I mean to have a real romance in my life and stick to it. Shall only have time for one, as when once I put on the harness I mean to keep it on. I’m going to be one of the biggest millionnaires in the United States. Say, what made you marry so young? You don’t look more than sixteen.”

“I’m nineteen,” replied Julia, haughtily.

“Well, don’t get huffy. You ought to see how extra sweet Cherry looks when some one tells her she looks ten years younger than she is—”

“So does Aunt Maria!” Julia laughed again. “Fancy a boy like you noticing such things.”

“I’m fifteen, not so young for a man, particularly when he’s been brought up in a family of women. He gets on to all their curves—I tell you what! And I can tell you that many an American boy of fifteen is supporting his mother—whole family.”

“You don’t mean it!”

“I do. It’s not so easy, but it’s done every day. I don’t pretend there are not lots that let their sisters work, but that’s either because they can’t get along, no matter how hard they try, or because there’s a screw loose—foreign blood, most likely. No real American would do it. If pa died to-morrow, I’d quit school and go right into the firm. Nobody’d get the best of me, neither.”

It was impossible to resist such firm self-confidence. Julia looked at him in open admiration.

“Say!” he exclaimed, with one of his dazzling leaps among the peaks of conversation. “Would you mind letting your hair down?”

“Why—What?”

“I’d like to see all of it.” And young Tay spoke in the tone of one unaccustomed to have his requests ignored. “Do.”

Julia looked him over, shrugged her shoulders, then took out the combs and pins. After all, he was only a boy, and she was feeling singularly contented. It was seldom that she had experienced more than a fleeting moment of companionship. She had come near to it with Nigel, Bridgit, and Ishbel, but they seemed years older than herself, and vastly superior. She would have been unwilling to admit it, but at this moment she really felt sixteen.

“Jiminy!” exclaimed young Tay, as the breeze lifted the shining masses of hair. “There’s nothing to beat it even in California. Red? Not a bit of it. It’s the color of flames, and flames are a clear red-yellow—like Guinea gold.”

He didn’t touch it, but his eyes sparkled as he watched it float, or hang about her white face and brilliant eyes in their black frames. “Gee! But I’d like to marry you. Why couldn’t you wait awhile?”

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” said Julia, who, like most females, was of a literal turn. “I shouldn’t be here, but in the West Indies, and you might never go there.”

“Well, what’s done’s done,” replied the boy, gloomily, and with the agreeable sensation of being the blighted hero of a romance so early in life. “What sort of a chap is your husband? I shall hate him, but I’d like to know—”

“He—well—he’s—”

“You’re not so dead gone on him,” said the boy, shrewdly.

“Not what?”

“More slang. Not—oh, hang it, it doesn’t sound so well in plain English. That’s what slang’s for. How old is he?”

“Forty-one.”

“Great Scott!”

The boy betrayed his own youth in that exclamation, in spite of his precocious wisdom. Forty-one suggests senile decay to arrogant fifteen. Julia’s own youth leaped to that heartfelt outbreak, and she burst into tears.

Young Tay forgot that he was in love with her, and patted her heartily on the back. “Oh, say! Don’t do that!” he cried. “But what did you do it for?”

Julia, to the first confidant she had ever had, sobbed out her story. Daniel pranced about the roof of the tower and kicked loose stones into space. “I—I—hate him,” concluded Julia, then stopped in terror, realizing that she had never admitted as much to herself. But she squarely faced the truth. “I do. And—I’m—I’m frightened.”

“See here.” Daniel sat down beside her once more. “You’re only a kid, and this is the very worst I ever heard. Talk about cruelty to animals! I’ve read some of those novels that are always lying round the house—English high life, and all that rot—but I supposed they were all made up. I never believed that mothers really made their daughters marry against their will. Why, somehow, it sounds like ancient history. Say—this is what you must do—come to California with us. Cherry’ll manage it. She’s rich, all right, and manages everything and everybody. Then just as soon as I’m old enough I’ll marry you—see?”

“How could I marry you when I’m married already?”

“Divorce. Plain as a pikestaff. And I’ll take bully good care of you, and never look at another girl.”

Julia dried her eyes. The plan was alluring, but in a moment she shook her head. Her keen intuitions warned her not to mention the planets to this ultra-occidental person, but there was another argument equally forcible.

“My husband would kill us both. He—he—I’ve never seen him in a temper—he’s taking care of his heart—but I feel he’s got a horrible one, and he seems to enjoy saying that if ever I looked at another man he’d strangle us both—”

“Pooh! I guess they all say that when they’re first married—”

“And he’s cruel to animals. Englishmen are seldom that. It isn’t that I’m really afraid of him now—it’s that I have a presentiment that I shall be some day. His eyes are sometimes so strange—not like eyes at all—just glass—he—he—doesn’t look human then.”

“He must be a peach. Gee!—but I’d like to punch him. You’ve got to come with us. That’s certain. I’ll talk Cherry over to-night. She’d just love figuring in a sensation with the British aristocracy.”

“Perhaps she wouldn’t care to offend it,” said the more astute female. “From all I hear, the rich Americans that come to London don’t do much to—”

“Don’t mind my feelings! Queer themselves. I guess not. But I’ll bring her round. Oh, don’t put your hair up!”

“It is time to go back.” Julia gave her hair a dexterous twist, wound the coil about her head, and pinned it in place. “You must have your tea.”

“Tea!” The contempt of composite American manhood exploded in his tones.

“Well, you can have whiskey and soda, although you’re rather young—”

For the first time Daniel’s magnificent aplomb deserted him. He flushed and turned away his head. “That’s where you’ve got me. I’ve had orders from pa not to touch alcohol or tobacco until I’m twenty-one. If I do, I’ll lose my chance of being taken into the firm, be put to work as a clerk somewhere, and get no more education. If I pull out all right, I’m to have ten thousand dollars plunk on my twenty-first birthday. You see the San Francisco boys, particularly when they’ve got money, are pretty wild. I don’t say I wouldn’t like to be once in a while, just for the fun of the thing, but I promised to please pa—he was so uneasy, and I’m the only son. But when I get that ten thousand I’m going to blow it in on a big spree—have suppers in the Palace Hotel, and throw all the plates out of the window into the court—just to show what I can do; then settle down. What I’ve made up my mind to do, I’ll do. I’m not a bit afraid of liquor or anything else getting the better of me.”

Julia, who was watching him, was puzzled at the expression of his mobile face. It was not so much that its natural strength was relaxed for a moment by some subtle source of weakness, as that the strong passions of the man stirred in their heavy sleep and sent a fight wave across the clean carefully sentinelled mind above. Julia did not pretend to understand, nor did any ghost in her own depths whisper of the future. She put her arm about his neck and kissed him impulsively.

“That’s splendid of you. And don’t you ever drink. It killed my father, and it’s killing my brother. And it makes people so hideous to look at. Now come down. I don’t want Aunt Maria to scold me. They don’t mean it, all these older people, but they humiliate me all the time. You are the only person I’ve met in England that makes me feel it’s not silly to be young.”

She picked her way daintily down the rough staircase, young Tay after her, again with that sense of being willing to follow her to the end of the earth. He even drank a cup of tea. But the ancestral hall, with its women in gay tea-gowns, and a few men who had returned earlier than their more ardent companions, made him feel suddenly very young and very American. He looked at Julia, whose place at the tea-table was occupied by Mrs. Winstone, and who was attracting as little attention as Emily, and felt more chivalrously in love than ever.