Twenty-three years before the opening of this desultory tale its heroine was born on the island of Santa Catalina, a fragment of Southern California. Her father had begun life as a professor of classics in a worthy Eastern college, but, his health breaking down, he betook himself and his small patrimony to the State which electrifies the nerves in its northern half and blunts them in its southern. Jonathan Shore wrote to his cousin, Lyman T. Moulton:

“I haven’t a nerve left with a point on it; have recovered some measure of health and lost what little ambition I ever possessed. I am going to open an inn for sportsmen on the island of Santa Catalina, so that I shall be reasonably sure of the society of gentlemen and make enough money to replenish my library now and then—my books are on the way. Here I remain for the rest of my natural life.”

But he crossed over to Los Angeles occasionally. At a soirÉe he met the daughter—and only child—of one of the largest landholders in Southern California, and danced with no one else that night. She married the scholarly innkeeper with the blessing of her father, who was anxious to pass his declining years in peace with a young wife. The bride, for coincident if not similar reasons, was glad to move to Catalina. She was the belle of her time, this Madelina Joyce, and her dark beauty came down to her from Indian ancestors. Her New England great-grandfather had come to California long before the discovery of gold, bought, for a fraction, two hundred thousand acres from the Mexican government, and married, despite the protests of his Spanish friends, an Indian girl of great beauty, both of face and character.

The Pueblo bride had lived but two years to receive the snubs of the haughty ladies of Santa Barbara, her ardent young husband had shot himself over her grave, and the boy was brought up by the padres of the mission. Fortunately, he came to man’s estate shortly before the United States occupation, and managed to save a portion of his patrimony from the most rapacious set of scoundrels that ever followed in the wake of a victorious army. This in turn descended to his son, who, in spite of Southern indolence and a hospitality as famous as his cellar, his liberal appreciation of all the good things of life, and a half-dozen lawsuits, still retained fifty thousand of the ancestral acres, and had given his word to his daughter that they should go to her unencumbered. This promise he kept, and when Catalina was ten years old he died, at good-will with all the world. His widow moved to San Francisco with her freedom and her liberal portion, and Mrs. Shore announced that she must give the ranch her personal attention. The ten years had been happy, for the husband and wife loved each other and were equally devoted to their beautiful, unsmiling baby. But there were deep wells of laughter in Mrs. Shore, and much energy. She wept for her father, but welcomed the change in her life, not only because she had reached the age when love of change is most insistent, but because she had begun to dread the hour of confession that life on an island, even with the man of one’s choice, was insufficient.

Mr. Shore himself was not averse to change so long as it did not take him out of California, although he refused to sell the little property on the island where he had spent so many happy years.

From the hour Mrs. Shore settled down in the splendid old adobe ranch-house she watched no more days lag through her fingers. Attended by Catalina she rode over some portion of the estate every day, and if a horse had strayed or a cow had calved she knew it before her indolent vaqueros. She personally attended, each year, to the sheep-shearing and the cattle-branding, the crops and the stock sales. Once a year she gave a great barbecue, to which all within a radius of a hundred miles were invited, and once a week she indulged herself in the gossip, the shops, and the dances of Santa Barbara.

In the vast solitude of the ranch Catalina grew up, carefully educated by her father, petted and indulged by her mother, hiding from the society that sought Mrs. Shore, but friendly with the large army of Mexican and Indian retainers. When she was persuaded by her mother to attend a party in Santa Barbara she rooted herself in a corner and glowered in her misery, snubbing every adventurous youth that approached her. She adored books, her out-door life, her parents, and asked for nothing further afield.

When she was eighteen her father died. She rode to the extreme confines of the ranch and mourned him, returning to her life at home with the stolidity of her Indian ancestors. Mrs. Shore grieved also, but by this time she was too busy a woman to consort with the past. Moreover, she was now at liberty to take Catalina to San Francisco and give her the proper tutors in languages and music. Incidentally, she made many new friends and enjoyed with all her vivid nature the life of a city which she had visited but twice before. She returned in the following winter and extended her fame as a hostess. Catalina found San Francisco society but little more interesting than that of the South, and enjoyed the reputation of being as rude as she was beautiful. Here, however, her Indian ancestress had her belated revenge. Her brief and tragic story cast a radiant halo about the indifferent Catalina, whose strain of aboriginal blood was extolled as the first cause in a piquant and original beauty; all her quaint eccentricities—which were merely the expression of a proud and reticent nature anxious to be let alone—were traced to the same artless source, and when one day in the park she sprang from her horse and shook the editor of a personal weekly until his teeth rattled in his head, her unique reputation was secure.

The greater part of the year was spent on the ranch. Mrs. Shore loved the world, but she was a woman of business above all things, and determined that the ranch should be a splendid inheritance for her child. Her time was closer than she knew. In all the vigor of her middle years, with the dark radiance of her beauty little dimmed, and an almost pagan love of mere existence, she was done to death by a bucking mustang, unseated for the first time since she had mounted a horse, and kicked beyond recognition.

Catalina resolutely put the horror of those days behind her, and for several months was as energetic a woman of business as her mother had been. She was mistress of a great tract of land, of herself, her time, her future. When her stoical grief for her mother subsided she found life interesting and stimulating. She rode about the ranch in the morning, or conferred with her lawyer, who drove out once a week; the afternoons she spent in the great court of the old house, with its stone fountain built by the ancestors who had learned their craft from the mission fathers, its palms and banana-trees, its old hollyhocks and roses. Here she read or dreamed vaguely of the future. What she wanted of life beyond this dreaming Southern land, where only an earthquake broke the monotony, was as vague of outline as her mountains under their blue mists, but its secrets were a constant and delightful well of perplexity. For two years she was contented, and at times, when galloping down to the sea in the early dawn, the old moon, bony and yellow, sinking to its grave in the darkest canyon of the mountain, and the red sun leaping from the sea, she was supremely happy.

Then, in a night, discontent settled upon her. She wanted change, variety; she wanted to see the world—Europe above all things; and when her Eastern relatives, with whom she corresponded, in obedience to a last request of her father, again pressed her to visit them, and mentioned that they were contemplating a trip abroad, she started on three hours’ notice, leaving the ranch in charge of a trusted overseer and the executors of her mother’s will.

She found her relatives living in a suburb of New York, their social position very different from that her mother had given her in California. Nothing saved them from the narrow routine of the suburban middle class but the intellectual proclivities of Mr. Moulton, who was reader for a publishing house and the literary adviser of the pseudo-intellectual. Through the constant association of his name with moral and non-sensational fiction, his well-balanced attitude of piety tinctured by humor, the pleasant style with which he indited irreproachable and elevated platitudes, his stern and invariable denunciation of the unorthodox in religion, in ideas, and in style, and his genially didactic habit of telling his readers what they wished to hear, he had achieved the rank of a great critic. As he really was an estimable man and virtuous husband, of agreeable manners, sufficiently hospitable, and extremely careful in choosing his friends, his position in the literary world was quite enviable. The great and the safe took tea on his lawn, and if the great and unsafe laughed at both the tea and the critic that was the final seal of their unregeneracy.

When Catalina arrived, after lingering for a fortnight in Boston with a friend she had made on the train, she liked him at once, unjustly despised Mrs. Moulton, who was the best of wives and copied her husband’s manuscripts, hated Jane, and recognized in Lydia a human being in whom one could find a reasonable amount of companionship, in spite of the magnetism of the mirror—or even the polished surface of a panel—for her complacent eyes. Lydia was innocently vain, and, being the beauty of the family, believed herself to be very beautiful indeed. She always made a smart appearance, and was frankly desirous of admiration. Like many family beauties, she had a strong will and was reasonably clever. When the first opportunity to go to Europe arrived she had reached what she called a critical point in her life. She confided to Catalina that she was becoming morbidly tired of mere existence and hated the sight of every literary man she knew, particularly the young ones.

“Of course, they are more or less the respectable hangers-on that give us the benefit of their society,” she said, gloomily. “Those that scurry about writing little stories for the magazines and weekly papers—it seems to me a real man might find something better to do. We know all the big ones, but they are too busy to come out here often, and father sees them at the Century and Authors’ clubs, anyhow. We hardly know a man who isn’t a publisher, an editor, or a writer of something or other—perhaps an occasional artist. For my part, I’d give my immortal soul to be one of those lucky girls that go to Mrs. Astor’s parties; that’s my idea of life. If a millionaire would only fall in love with me—or any old romance, for that matter!”

“Have you never been in love?” asked Catalina, afraid of the sound of her own voice but deeply interested.

“Not the least little bit, more is the pity. I wouldn’t mind even being heart-broken for a while.”

It was this frankness that endeared her to Catalina. “Jane is third rate, and tries to conceal the fact from herself and others by an affectation of such of the literary galaxy as make the least appeal to the popular taste, and cousin Lyman is no critic,” she informed herself three days after her arrival. “Cousin Miranda is just one of those American women who are invalids for no reason but because they want to be, and I suppose even Lydia would get on my nerves in time. Thank Heaven, when they do I can leave at a moment’s notice.”

After four months of the friction of travel, Catalina had half hoped her relatives would reject her startling proposal and abandon her to a future full of dangers and freedom.