Not that any one else in San Francisco was quite as exclusive as Mrs.
Groome. Others might be as faithful in their way to the old tradition, be
as proud of their inviolate past, when "money did not count," and people
merely "new," or of unknown ancestry, did not venture to knock at the
gates: but the successive flocks of young folks had overpowered their
conservative parents, and Society had loosened its girdle, until in this
year of grace nineteen-hundred-and-six, there were few rich people so
hopelessly new that their ball rooms either in San Francisco or "Down the
Peninsula," were unknown to a generation equally determined to enjoy life
and indifferent to traditions.

Mrs. Groome alone had set her face obdurately against any change in the
personnel of the eighties. She had the ugliest old house in San Francisco,
and the change from lamps to gas had been her last concession to the march
of time. The bath tubs were tin and the double parlors crowded with the
imposing carved Italian furniture whose like every member of her own set
had, in the seventies and eighties, brought home after their frequent and
prolonged sojourns abroad: for the prouder the people of that era were of
their lofty social position on the edge of the Pacific, the more time did
they spend in Europe.

Mrs. Groome might be compelled therefore to look at new people in the homes
of her friends--even her proud daughter, Mrs. Abbott, had unaccountably
surrendered to the meretricious glitter of Burlingame--but she would not
meet them, she would not permit Alexina to cross their thresholds, nor
should the best of them ever cross her own.

Poor Alexina, forced to submit, her mother placidly impervious to coaxings,
tears, and storms, had finally compromised the matter to the satisfaction