The conversation with her old friend had upset Mrs. Ryan. These were grievances² she did not talk of to all the world, and the luxury of such plain speaking was paid for by a re-awakened smart. The numb³ ache of a sorrow was always with her, but her consciousness of it was dulled in the diversion of every day’s occupations. Bringing it to the surface this way gave it a new vitality⁴, and when the conversation was over and the visitor gone it refused to subside⁵ into its old place.  
She went slowly up stairs, hearing the low murmur⁶ of voices from the sitting-room⁷ where Cornelia and Jack⁸ Duffy were still secluded⁹. Even the thought of that satisfactorily-budding romance did not cheer her as it had done earlier in the day. As she had told Cannon¹⁰, she was not the woman she had been. Old age was coming on her and with it a softening¹¹ of her iron nature. She wanted her son, her Benjamin, dearly beloved with all the forces of her maturity[237] as his father had been with all the glow of her youth.
 
In her own room she threw aside the lace curtains, and looking out on the splendor¹² of the afternoon, determined¹³ to seek cheer in the open air. Like all Californians she had a belief in the healing beneficence of air and sunlight. As the sun had soothed¹⁴ Berny of her sense of care so now it wooed her enemy also to seek solace¹⁵ in its balm. She rang for the servant and ordered the carriage. A few minutes later, clad in rich enshrouding black, a small and fashionable bonnet¹⁶ perched on her head, she slowly made her way down stairs and out to the sidewalk where the victoria, glittering in the trim perfection of its appointments and drawn¹⁷ by a pair of well-matched chestnuts¹⁸, stood at the curb¹⁹.
 
The man on the box touched his hat with respectful greeting and the Chinese butler, who had accompanied her down the steps, arranged the rug over her knees and stepped back with the friendly “good-by,” which is the politeness of his race. They respected, feared, and liked her. Every domestic who had ever worked in Delia Ryan’s service from the first “hired girl” of her early Shasta days to the staff that now knew the rigors²⁰ of her dominion²¹, had found her a just and generous if exacting²² mistress. She had never been unfair, she had never been unkind. She was one of themselves and she knew how to[238] manage them, how to make them understand that she was master, and that no drones were permitted in her hive; how to make them feel that she had a heart that sympathized with them, not as creatures of an alien class remotely removed from her own, but as fellow beings, having the same passions, griefs and hopes as herself.
 
As the carriage rolled forward she settled back against the cushioned seat and let her eyes roam over the prospect²⁴. It was the heart of the afternoon, still untouched by chill, not a breath stirring. Passing up the long drive which leads to the park, the dust raised by wheels hung ruddy in the air. The long shadows of trees striped the roadway in an irregular black pattern, picked out with spatterings of sunshine, like a spilled, gold liquid. Belts of fragrance²⁵, the breaths of flowering shrubs²⁶, extended from bushy coppices, and sometimes the keen, acrid²⁷ odor of the eucalyptus²⁸ rose on the air. From this lane of entrance the park spread fan-like into a still, gracious pleasance. The rich, golden light slept on level stretches of turf and thick mound-shaped groups of trees. The throb²⁹ of music—the thin, ethereal music of out-of-doors—swelled and sank; the voices of children rose clear and fine from complicated distances, and once the raucous³¹ cry of a peacock split the quietness, seeming to break through the pictorial³² serenity³³ of the lovely, dreamy scene.
 
[239]Mrs. Ryan sat without movement, her face set in a sphinx-like profundity³⁴ of expression. People in passing carriages bowed to her but she did not see them and their salutes³⁶ went unreturned. Her vision was bent³⁷ back on scenes of her past, so far removed from what made up the present, so different and remote from her life to-day, that it did not seem as if the same perspective could include two such extremes. Even her children were not links of connection between those old dead times and now. They had been born when Con¹’s fortunes were in the ascendant. They had known none of the privations of the brave days when she and her man had faced life together, young, and loving, and full of hope.
 
The carriage ascended³⁸ a slight rise, and the sea, a glittering plain, lay in full view. It met the sky in a white dazzle of light. All its expanse coruscated³⁹ as if each wave was crested⁴⁰ with tinsel, and where they receded⁴¹ from the beach it was as though a web of white and shining tissue was drawn back, torn and glistening⁴², from the restraining clutch of the sand. The smooth bareness of fawn-colored dunes⁴³ swept back from the shore. They rose and fell in undulations, describing outlines of a suave⁴⁴, fluid grace, lovely as the forms of drifting snow, or the swell³⁰ of waves. Ocean and dunes, for all the splendor of sky and sun that overarched and warmed them, suggested a gaunt, primeval desolation. They[240] had the loneliness of the naked earth and the unconquerable sea—were a bit of the primordial⁴⁵ world before man had tamed and softened⁴⁶ it.
 
Mrs. Ryan swept them with a narrow, inward gaze which saw neither, but, in their place, the house in Virginia City, where she and Con had lived when they were first married in the early sixties. It was of “frame”—raw, yellow boards with narrow strips of wood nailed over every seam to keep the wind out. There had been a rough porch on one side where her wash-tub had stood. Out-of-doors there in the summer weather she had bent over the wash-board most of the day. She had made enough money to furnish the prospect hole that Con was working, with tools and miner’s supplies. Little Dick was born there; he had died afterward⁴⁷ in Shasta. He used to lie in a wash-basket on the soiled linen⁴⁸ in the sun. He would have been forty-five now, sixteen years older than Dominick.
 
She gave an order to the coachman who, drawing up, turned the horses, and the carriage started on its return trip. The sun was behind it, painting with level, orange rays the thick foliage⁴⁹ of trees and the backs of foot passengers. Whatever it touched had the appearance of being overlaid with a gilded⁵⁰ glaze⁵¹ through which its natural colors shone, deepened and brilliant.
 
Mrs. Ryan’s memories had leaped from Virginia City to Shasta. After Con’s prospect at[241] Gold Hill had “petered” they had moved to California, been members of that discouraged route which poured, impoverished⁵² in pocket and enfeebled in health, from the wreck⁵³ of the gutted⁵⁴ Nevada camp back to their own Golden State and its beguiling⁵⁵ promises. They had opened a grocery in Shasta in sixty-eight, first a little place where Con and she waited behind the counter, then, when they began to prosper⁵⁶, a big store on the corner. “Ryan’s” was written over the entrance in the beginning, when they had no money to spend, in black on a strip of canvas, after that in gold letters on a handsome sign. She had kept the books there while Con had managed the business, and they had done well. It was the beginning of their prosperity and how they had worked for it! Night after night up till midnight and the next morning awake before the birds. Two children had died there and three had been born. It had been a full life, a splendid life, the best a woman could know, working for her own, making them a place in the world, fighting her way up, shoulder to shoulder with her man.
 
Money had been her goal. She had not wanted to hoard⁵⁷ it; of itself it meant nothing to her. She had wanted it for her children: to educate them better than she had been educated, to give them the advantages she had never known, to buy pleasures and position and co............