For Miss Scott, although only twenty, had already subjected most of
her maidenly illusions to mature critical analyses. She had voluntarily
accompanied her sister and mother to California, in the earnest
hope that nature contained something worth saying to her, and was
disappointed to find she had already discounted its value in the pages
of books. She hoped to find a vague freedom in this unconventional
life thus opened to her, or rather to show others that she knew how
intelligently to appreciate it, but as yet she was only able to express
it in the one detail of dress already alluded to. Some of the men, and
nearly all the women, she had met thus far, she was amazed to find,
valued the conventionalities she believed she despised, and were
voluntarily assuming the chains she thought she had thrown off. Instead
of learning anything from them, these children of nature had bored her
with eager questionings regarding the civilization she had abandoned, or
irritated her with crude imitations of it for her benefit. "Fancy,"
she had written to a friend in Boston, "my calling on Sue Murphy, who
remembered the Donner tragedy, and who once shot a grizzly that was
prowling round her cabin, and think of her begging me to lend her my
sack for a pattern, and wanting to know if 'polonays' were still worn."
She remembered more bitterly the romance that had tickled her earlier
fancy, told of two college friends of her brother-in-law's who were
living the "perfect life" in the mines, laboring in the ditches with
a copy of Homer in their pockets, and writing letters of the purest
philosophy under the free air of the pines. How, coming unexpectedly on
them in their Arcadia, the party found them unpresentable through dirt,
and thenceforth unknowable through domestic complications that had
filled their Arcadian cabin with half-breed children.

Much of this disillusion she had kept within her own heart, from a
feeling of pride, or only lightly touched upon it in her relations with