to wait upon them, the three daughters of these two prominent
families considered themselves as obviously better than their
neighbours, and bore themselves accordingly. Cyrus Frost and Graham
Parker had come to California as young men, in the seventies; had
cast in their lot with little Monroe, and had grown rich with the
town. It was a credit to the state now; they had found it a mere
handful of settlers' cabins, with one stately, absurd mansion
standing out among them, in a plantation of young pepper and willow
and locust and eucalyptus trees.

This was the home of Malcolm Monroe, turreted, mansarded, generously
filled with the glass windows that had come in a sailing vessel
around the Horn. Incongruous, pretentious, awkward, it might to a
discerning eye have suggested its owner, who was then not more than
thirty years old; a tall, silent, domineering man. He was reputed
rich, and Miss Elizabeth--or "Lily"--Price, a pretty Eastern girl
who visited the Frosts in the winter of 1878, was supposed to be
doing very well for herself when she married him, and took her
bustles and chignons, her blonde hair with its "French twist," and
her scalloped, high-buttoned kid shoes to the mansion on North Main
Street.

Now the town had grown to several hundred times its old size;
schools, churches, post-office, shops, a box factory, a lumber yard,
and a winery had come to Monroe. There was the Town Hall, a plain
wooden building, and, at the shabby outskirts of South Main Street,
a jail. The Interurban Trolley "looped" the town once every hour.

All these had helped to make Cyrus Frost and Graham Parker rich.
They, like Malcolm Monroe, had married, and had built themselves