Thirty years ago there were a great many detached Englishmen in

California, fourth and fifth sons, remittance men, family

scapegraces who had been banished to the farthest frontier by

relatives who regarded California as beyond the reach of gossip,

and almost beyond the reach of letters. Checks, small but regular,

arrived quarterly for these gentry, who had only to drink, sleep,

play cards, and demoralize the girls of the country. Here and

there among them, to be sure, were pink-skinned boys as fresh and

sweet as the apple-blossoms under which they rode their horses,

but for the most part the emigrants were dissipated, disenchanted,

clinging loyally to the traditions of the older country that had

discarded them, and scorning the fragrant and inexhaustible

richness of the new land that had made them welcome. They were, as

a class, silent, only voluble on the subject of the despised

country of their adoption, and absolutely non-committal as to

their own histories. But far from questioning their credentials,

the women and girls everywhere accepted them eagerly, caught

something of an English accent and something of an English

arrogance.

So Clara Mumford, a rose of a girl, cream-skinned, blue-eyed, and

innocent with the terrible innocence of the village girlhood that

feels itself so wise--Clara, who knew, because her two older

sisters were married, where babies come from, and knew, because of

Alta Porter's experience, that girls--nice girls, who went with

one through the high school--can yield to temptation and be

ruined--Clara only felt, in shyly announcing her engagement to

Gerald Fairfax, that Fate had been too kind.

That this glittering stranger twice her age--why, he was even a

little bald--a man who had travelled, who knew people of title,

knew books, and manners, and languages--that he should marry an

undertaker's daughter in Los Lobos! It was unbelievable. Clara's

only misgiving during her short engagement was that he would

disappear like a dream. She agreed with everything he said; even

carrying her new allegiance to the point of laughing a little at

her own people: the layer cakes her mother made for the Sunday

noonday dinner; the red-handed, freckled swain who called on her

younger sister in the crisp, moonlighted winter evenings; and the

fact that her father shaved in the kitchen.

A few weeks slipped by, and Clara duly confided her youth and her

innocence and her roses to her English husband, a little ashamed

of the wedding presents her friends sent her, even a little

doubtful of her parents' handsome gift of a bird's-eye maple

bedroom set and a parlor set in upholstered cherry.

On her side she accepted everything unquestionably: the shabby

little ranch house that smelled of wood smoke, and tobacco smoke,

and dogs; the easy scorn of her old friends on her husband's part

that so soon alienated her from them; the drink that she quickly

learned to regard with uneasiness and distrust. It was not that

Jerry ever got really intoxicated, but he got ugly, excitable,

irritable, even though quite in control of his actions and his

senses.




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