Every summer afternoon the trade winds blow through San Francisco, winging their way across miles of chill, salt sea, and striking the bulwarked city with a boisterous2 impact. The long streets seem as paths, lines of least resistance, and the winds press themselves into the narrow limits and whoop3 buoyantly along, carrying before them dust, rags, scraps4 of paper—sometimes hats.
Their period of highest recognized activity is from May till September, but before that, vagrant5 breezes, skirmishers sent out in advance, assault the city. They follow on still, sunny mornings, which show not the slightest warning symptom of the riotous6 forces which are designing to seize upon and disrupt the tranquillity7 of the afternoon. Eleven sees them up and stirring; by midday they have begun the attack. The city, in a state of complete unpreparedness, is at their mercy and they sweep through it in arrogant8 triumph, veiled in a flying scud9 of dust. Unsuspecting wayfarers10 meet them at corners, and stand, helpless victims[285] of a playfulness, fierce and disconcerting as that of tigers. Hats, cleverly running on one rim12, career along the sidewalk. Ladies have difficulties with parasols, heretofore docile13 and well-behaved. Articles of dress, accustomed to hang decorously, show sudden ambitions to rise and ride the elements. And those very people who in winter speak gratefully of the winds as “the scavengers of San Francisco” may be heard calling curses down on them.
Such a wind, the first of the season, was abroad on a bright morning in early April, and Cornelia Ryan was out in it. It was a great morning for Cornelia. Even the wind could not ruffle14 her joyousness15. She was engaged. Two evenings before, Jack16 Duffy, who had been hovering17 round the subject for a month, poised18 above it, as a hawk19 above delightful20 prey21, had at last descended22 and Cornelia’s anxieties were at an end. She had been so relieved, elated, and flustered23 that she had not been able to pretend the proper surprise, but had accepted blushing, stammering24 and radiant. She had been blushing, stammering and radiant when she told her mother that night, and to-day, forty-eight hours later, she was still blushing, stammering, and radiant.
It was not alone that she was honestly in love with Jack, but Cornelia, like most maidens25 in California and elsewhere, was in love with being admired, deferred26 to, and desired. And despite[286] her great expectations and her prominent position, she had had rather less of this kind of delightful flattery than most girls. Walking down town in the clear, sun-lit morning, she was, if not handsome, of a fresh and blooming wholesomeness27, which is almost as attractive and generally wears better. The passers-by might readily have set her down as a charming woman, for whom men sighed, and in this surmise28 been far from the mark. She had had few lovers before Jack Duffy. That matter-of-fact sturdiness, that absence of softness and mystery so noticeable in Californian women, was particularly accentuated29 in her case, and had robbed her of the poetic30 charm of which beauty and wealth can never take the place.
But to-day she was radiant, a sublimated31, exultant32 Cornelia, loved at last and by a man of whom she could completely and unreservedly approve. There were times when Cornelia—she was thirty—had feared that she might have to go abroad and acquire a foreign husband, or, worse still, move to New York and make her selection from such relics33 of decayed Knickerbocker families as were in the market. She was woman enough to refuse to die unwed. Now these dark possibilities were dispelled34. In her own state, in her own town, she had found her mate, Jack Duffy, whose father had known her father and been shift boss under Bill Cannon35 in the roaring days of Virginia City. It was like[287] royalty36 marrying into its own order, the royalty of Far Western millions, knowing its own ramifications37 having its own unprinted Almanach de Gotha—deep calling unto deep!
The wind was not yet out in force; its full, steady sweep would not be inaugurated till early in the afternoon. It came now in gusts38 which fell upon Cornelia from the back and accelerated her forward progress, throwing out on either side of her a flapping sail of skirt. Cornelia, who was neat and precise, usually resented this rough handling, but to-day she only laughed, leaning back, with one hand holding her hat. In the shops where she stopped to execute various commissions she had difficulty in suppressing her smiles. She would have liked to delay over her purchases and chat with the saleswomen, and ask them about their families, and send those who looked tired off for a month into the country.
It was after midday when she found herself approaching that particular block, along the edge of which the flower-venders place their baskets and display their wares39. In brilliantly-colored mounds40 the flowers stood stacked along the outer rim of the sidewalk, a line of them, a man behind each basket vociferating the excellence41 of the bouquet42 he held forward to the passer’s inspection43. In the blaze of sun that overlaid them, the piled-up blossoms showed high-colored and variegated44 as a strip of carpeting.
[288]Cornelia never bought flowers at the street corners. The town house was daily supplied from the greenhouses at the country place at Menlo. When sick friends, anniversaries, or entertainment called for special offerings they were ordered from expensive florists45 and came in made-up bunches, decorated with sashes of ribbon. But to-day she hesitated before the line of laden46 baskets. Some of the faces behind them looked so dreary47, and Cornelia could not brook48 the sight of a dreary face on this day of joy. The dark, wistful eyes of an Italian boy holding out a bunch of faded jack roses, stiffly set in a fringe of fern, made a sudden appeal to her and she bought the roses. Then the old man who was selling carnations49 looked so lean and grizzled that he must be cheered, and two bunches of the carnations were added to the roses. The boys and men, seeing that the brilliant lady was in a generous mood, collected about her, shouting out the excellences50 of their particular blossoms, and pressing sample bunches on her attention.
Cornelia, amused and somewhat bewildered, looked at the faces and bought recklessly. She was stretching out her hand to beckon51 to the small boy with the wilted52 pansies, who was not big enough to press through the throng53, when a man’s voice behind her caught her ear.
“Well, Cornelia, are you trying to corner the curb-stone market?”
[289]She wheeled swiftly and saw her brother, laughing and looking at the stacked flowers in the crook54 of her arm.
“Dominick!” she exclaimed, “you’re just the person I want to see. I was going to write to you. I’ve got lots to tell you.”
“Come along then and take lunch with me. I was on my way up to Bertrand’s when I saw you. They’ll give us a good lunch there and you can tell me all your secrets.”
The flower sellers, who had been listening with unabashed eagerness, realized that their prey was about to be ravished from them, and raised their voices in a chorus of wailing55 appeal. As Cornelia moved forward they moved round her, thrusting bouquets56 under her eyes in a last hope, the boy with the wilted pansies, on the brink57 of tears, hanging on the outskirts58 of the crowd. Cornelia might have forgotten him, but her eye, sweeping59 back for an absent moment, saw his face, bereft60 of all hope—a face of childish despair above his drooping61 pansies.
“Here, boy with the pansies,” she called, and sent a silver dollar through the air toward him, “that’s for you. Keep it and the flowers, too. I’ve too many now and can’t carry any more. Maybe he’ll sell them to some one else,” she said to Dominick, as they crossed the street. “He’s such a little boy to be earning his bread!”
They walked up the street toward Bertrand’s,[290] a French restaurant which for years had enjoyed the esteem62 of the city’s gourmets63. The wind was now very high. It tore at Cornelia’s clothes and made it necessary for Dominick to hold his hat on, his hand spread flat on the crown. A trail of blossoms, torn from the flowers each carried, sprinkled the pavement behind them. Cornelia, with her head down and her face toward her brother, shouted remarks at him, every now and then pausing in a stifle64 of laughter to struggle with her draperies, which at one moment rose rebellious65, and at the next were wound about her in an umbrella-like sheath.
They had often met this way in the past, when the elder Mrs. Ryan’s wrath66 had been in its first, untameable freshness, and her son had seen her seldom. In those days of estrangement67, Cornelia had been the tie between Dominick and his home. She loved her brother and was sorry for him, and had felt the bitterness of the separation, not alone as a family misfortune, but as a scandal over which mean people talked. Had it rested with her, she would long ago have overlooked the past and have opened the door to her sister-in-law. Not that she felt any regard or interest in Berny Iverson; her feeling for her was now, and always would be, largely composed of that undying unfriendliness and repugnance69 that the naturally virtuous70 woman feels for her sister with the tache. But Cornelia was of a younger and[291] milder generation than her mother. She had not fought hard for what she had and, like Dominick, there was more of the sunny-tempered, soft-hearted Con11 Ryan in her than of the strong and valiant71 woman who had made him and given him ............