of herself and of her own close chosen friend, Aileen Lawton. She
accompanied her mother with outward resignation to small dinner dances and
to the Matriarch balls, presided over by the newly elected social leader,
a lady of unimpeachable Southern ancestry and indifference to wealth,
who pledged her Virginia honor to Mrs. Groome that Alexina should not be
introduced to any young man whose name was not on her own visiting list;
and, while her mother slept, the last of the Ballinger-Groomes accompanied
Aileen (chaperoned by an unprincipled aunt, who was an ancient enemy of
Maria Groome) to parties quite as respectable but infinitely gayer, and
indubitably mixed.

She was quite safe, for Mrs. Groome, when free of social duties, retired on
the stroke of nine with a novel, and turned off the gas at ten. She never
read the society columns of the newspapers, choked as they were with
unfamiliar and plebeian names; and her friends, regarding Alexina's gay
disobedience as a palatable joke on "poor old Maria," and sympathetic with
youth, would have been the last to enlighten her.



III


Alexina had never enjoyed herself more than to-night. Young Mrs. Hofer, who
had bought and remodeled the old Polk house on Nob Hill--the very one in
which Mrs. Groome's oldest daughter had made her debut in the far-off
eighties--had turned all her immense rooms into a bower of every variety of
flower that bloomed on the rich California soil. It was her second great
party of the season, and it had been her avowed intention to outdo the
first, which had attempted a revival of Spanish California and been the