to recall her earlier dreams of happiness. The whole-hearted devotion
to gaiety of this stranded little community, its elegance, despite
its limitations, its unbounded hospitality to all within its guarded
portals, its very absence of intellectual criticism, made the formal
life of her brief past appear dull and drab in the retrospect. The
spirit of Puritanism seemed to have lost heart in those trackless
wastes between the Atlantic and the Pacific and turned back. True,
the moral code was rigid (on the surface); but far from too much
enjoyment of life, of quaffing eagerly at the brimming cup, being
sinful, they would have held it to be a far greater sin not to have
accepted all that the genius of San Francisco so lavishly provided.

Wildness and recklessness were in the air, the night life of San
Francisco was probably the maddest in the world; nor did the gambling
houses close their doors by day, nor the women of Dupont Street cease
from leering through their shuttered windows; a city born in delirium
and nourished on crime, whose very atmosphere was electrified and
whose very foundations were restless, would take a quarter of a
century at least to manufacture a decent thick surface of
conventionality, and its self-conscious respectable wing could no
more escape its spirit than its fogs and winds. But evil excitement
was tempered to irresponsible gaiety, a constant whirl of innocent
pleasures. When the spirit passed the portals untempered, and drove
women too highly-strung, too unhappy, or too easily bored, to the
divorce courts, to drink, or to reckless adventure, they were
summarily dropped. No woman, however guiltless, could divorce her
husband and remain a member of that vigilant court. It was all or
nothing. If a married woman were clever enough to take a lover
undetected and merely furnish interesting surmise, there was no
attempt to ferret out and punish her; for no society can exist