ilies had just arrived from town, or in
the late season, when prune picking grew slack. Night finds one weary
in the country, even when his day has brought only supervision of
labor. These town-bred folk, living from the soil and still but half
welded to it, fell unconsciously into farmer habits in this working
period.

The Goodyears and the Morses, more formal than their neighbors, did
indeed give a dinner once or twice a summer to this or that visitor
from San Francisco or San Jose. Otherwise, the colony gathered only at
this Sunday afternoon tea of Mrs. Tiffany's. Her place lay about
midway of the colony, her lawn, such as it was--no lawn flourishes
greatly in that land of dry summers--was the oldest and best kept of
all; further, they had acquired the habit. Already, these Californians
were beginning a country life remotely like that of England; a country
life made gracious by all the simple refinements, from bathtubs to
books. They had settled, too, into the ways of a clique; small and
informal as their entertainments were, minor jealousies of leadership
had developed already.

By a kind of consent never yet made law by any contest, the Goodyears
were leaders and dictators. He, Raleigh Goodyear, was passably rich;
his wife was by birth of that old Southern set which dominated the
society of San Francisco from its very beginning. Until their only
daughter married into the army and, by her money and connections,
advanced her husband to a staff position in Washington, Mrs. Goodyear
had figured among the patrons to those cotillions and assemblies by
which the elect, under selection of a wine agent, set themselves off
from the aspiring. Them the colony treated with familiar deference.

Mrs. Tiffany, whose native desire to please and accommodate had grown
with her kind of matrimony, held social leadership of a different
kind. Her summer house was the boudoir of this colony, as her town
house was the centre for quiet and informal entertainment just tinged
with Bohemia. Hers was the gate at which one stopped for a greeting
and a chat as one drove past on the road; she was forever running to
that gate. She knew the troubles of all her neighbors, both the town
dwellers of her set and the humbler folk who made fruit farming more
of a business. That rather silent husband of hers--a man getting an
uncomfortable peace from the end of a turbulent and disappointing life
which had just escaped great success--told her that she ha