Road where she had driven occasionally behind the doctor's spanking
team. It was four o'clock when she entered it and the wind had
fallen. The road was thronged with buggies, tandems, hacks, phaetons,
and four-in-hands. Society might be out of town but the still gayer
world was not. Madeleine, skirting the edge of the road to avoid
disaster stared eagerly behind her veil. Here were the reckless and
brilliant women of the demi-monde of whom she had heard so much, but
to whom she had barely thrown a glance when driving with her husband.
They were painted and dyed and kohled and their plumage would have
excited the envy of birds in Paradise. San Francisco had lured these
ladies "round the Horn" since the early Fifties: a different breed
from the camp followers of the late Forties. Some had fallen from a
high estate, others had been the mistresses of rich men in the East,
or belles in the half world of New York or Paris. Never had they
found life so free or pickings so easy as in San Francisco.

Madeleine knew that many of the eminent citizens she met in Society
kept their mistresses and flaunted them openly. It was, in fact,
almost a convention. She was not surprised to see several men who had
taken her in to dinner tooling these gorgeous cyprians and looking
far prouder than when they played host in the world of fashion. On
one of the gayest of the coaches she saw four of the young men who
were among the most devoted of her cavaliers at dances: Alexander
Groome, Amos Lawton, Ogden Bascom, and "Tom" Abbott, Jr. Groome was
paying his addresses to Maria Ballinger, "a fine figure of a girl"
who had inherited little of her mother's beauty but all of her
virtue, and Madeleine wondered if he would reform and settle down.
Abbott was engaged to Marguerite McLane and looked as if he were
having his last glad fling. Ogden Bascom had proposed to Guadalupe
Hathaway every month for five years. It was safe to say that he would