the first flush of gratitude to their
father for this opportune holiday, something of harmony had been
restored to the family circle that had of late been shaken by discord.

But their sanguine hopes of enjoyment were not entirely fulfilled. Both
Jessie and Christie were obliged to confess to a certain disappointment
in the aspect of the civilization they were now reentering. They at
first attributed it to the change in their own habits during the last
three months, and their having become barbarous and countrified in
their seclusion. Certainly in the matter of dress they were behind the
fashions as revealed in Montgomery Street. But when the brief solace
afforded them by the modiste and dressmaker was past, there seemed
little else to be gained. They missed at first, I fear, the chivalrous
and loyal devotion that had only amused them at Devil's Ford, and were
the more inclined, I think, to distrust the conscious and more civilized
gallantry of the better dressed and more carefully presented men they
met. For it must be admitted that, for obvious reasons, their criticisms
were at first confined to the sex they had been most in contact with.
They could not help noticing that the men were more eager, annoyingly
feverish, and self-asserting in their superior elegance and external
show than their old associates were in their frank, unrestrained habits.
It seemed to them that the five millionaires of Devil's Ford, in their
radical simplicity and thoroughness, were perhaps nearer the type of
true gentlemanhood than these citizens who imitated a civilization they
were unable yet to reach.

The women simply frightened them, as being, even more than the men,
demonstrative and excessive in their fine looks, their fine dresses,
their extravagant demand for excitement. In less than a week they found
themselves regretting--not the new villa on the slope of Devil's Ford,
which even in its own bizarre fashion was exceeded by the barbarous
ostentation of the villas and private houses around them--but the double
cabin under the trees, which now seemed to them almost aristocratic in
its grave simplicity and abstention. In the mysterious forests of masts
that thronged the city's quays they recalled the straight shafts of the
pines on Devil's slopes, only to miss the sedate repose and infinite
calm that used to environ them. In the feverish, pulsating life of the
young metropolis they often stopped oppressed, giddy, and choking; the
roar