Sleeping Fires

It was a San Francisco of simple, stately homes and wooden sidewalks -- in a time when the ladies of Rincon Hill would take their carriages to Market Street, and then gather to discuss the fortunes being made and lost in this veritable Southern Arcadia of a city. Even after the Civil War, the North suffered defeat after defeat in California. The South had its last stronghold there -- defiantly aristocratic in the face of the common Northerners, whose arrivals were never quite welcome.

In San Francisco numerous hopes centered upon young Dr. Talbot, who seemed well along the road to fortune. Although often surrounded by beautiful and vivacious girls, he always avowed he had seen too much of babies, and should die an old bachelor. Besides, he loved them all the girls -- when he did not damn them roundly, which he sometimes did . . . to their secret delight.

But now he affronted them by marrying someone no one had set eyes upon; and he even lacked the grace to go to his native South, in marrying an outsider. He had gone to "Boston," of all places, to find a wife!

Gertrude Atherton (1857-1948) wrote such novels rich in historical detail as "The Californians," "The White Morning" and "What Dreams May Come."