were at first confined to the sex they had been most in contact with.
They could not help noticing that the men were more eager, annoyingly
feverish, and self-asserting in their superior elegance and external
show than their old associates were in their frank, unrestrained habits.
It seemed to them that the five millionaires of Devil's Ford, in their
radical simplicity and thoroughness, were perhaps nearer the type of
true gentlemanhood than these citizens who imitated a civilization they
were unable yet to reach.

The women simply frightened them, as being, even more than the men,
demonstrative and excessive in their fine looks, their fine dresses,
their extravagant demand for excitement. In less than a week they found
themselves regretting--not the new villa on the slope of Devil's Ford,
which even in its own bizarre fashion was exceeded by the barbarous
ostentation of the villas and private houses around them--but the double
cabin under the trees, which now seemed to them almost aristocratic in
its grave simplicity and abstention. In the mysterious forests of masts
that thronged the city's quays they recalled the straight shafts of the
pines on Devil's slopes, only to miss the sedate repose and infinite
calm that used to environ them. In the feverish, pulsating life of the
young metropolis they often stopped oppressed, giddy, and choking; the
roar of the streets and thoroughfares was meaningless to them, except to
revive strange memories of the deep, unvarying monotone of the evening
wind over their humbler roof on the Sierran hillside. Civic bred and
nurtured as they were, the recurrence of these sensations perplexed and
alarmed them.

"It seems so perfectly ridiculous," said Jessie, "for us to feel as out
of place here as that Pike County servant girl in Sacramento who had
never seen a steamboat before; do you know, I quite had a turn the other