CHAPTER IV



I


That was a unique and vivid day for young Alexina Groome, whose disposition
was to look upon life as drama and asked only that it shift its scenes
often and be consistently entertaining and picturesque.

Never, so James told her, since her Grandmother Ballinger's reign, had
there been such life and movement in the old house. All Mrs. Groome's
intimate friends and many of Alexina's came to it, some to make kindly
inquiries, others to beg them to leave the city, many to gossip and
exchange experiences of that fateful morning; a few from Rincon Hill and
the old ladies' fashionable boarding-house district to claim shelter until
they could make their way to relatives out of town.

Mrs. Groome welcomed her friends not only with the more spontaneous
hospitality of an older time but in that spirit of brotherhood that
every disaster seems to release, however temporarily. Brotherhood is
unquestionably an instinct of the soul, an inheritance from that sunrise
era when mutual interdependence was as imperative as it was automatic. The
complexities of civilization have overlaid it, and almost but not wholly
replaced it by national and individual selfishness. But the world as yet is