As she walked down the hall she stooped absently and picked up a scrap of paper, hardly aware that she held it in her hand until she sat down once more before her mirror. Then she glanced at it. To her surprise it was an advertisement of a prize-fight, cut from a newspaper; and on the margin an illiterate hand had scrawled, "_Nine o'clock sharp._" She wondered which of the servants was indulging in the distractions of the ring. All except Lady Victoria's maid were Japs. Could the Frenchwoman have found a lover who had introduced her to the forbidden pleasures of the town? Obviously it was not Gwynne's for the date was two days old, and he had been in Menlo Park at the time. But she had more interesting things to ponder over. Being a good housekeeper, she folded the scrap and hid it under one of the little silver trays, intending to give it in the morning to Lady Victoria, who was the temporary mistress of the mansion. Then she fell to counting her pearls, wound them twice about her throat, decided that she preferred the single long ellipse falling among the blue flowers on her bosom, marvelled, in an abandon of femininity, at the dazzling whiteness of her skin. She was beautiful, no doubt of that; it might be as Lady Victoria and Flora Thangue asserted, that any future she chose was hers to command; and, as the latter had intimated, to be an English peeress, with her husband at the head of the state, was no mean destiny. To-night, her almost fanatical love of California was dormant. She felt wholly personal. Whatever the future, she wanted to be the most admired girl at this party to-night, to dominate its long-heralded splendors as a great soprano rises high and triumphant above the orchestral thunders of a Wagner opera. Old instincts were stirring subtly. She had the rest of her life for great ideals. To-night she would be an old-time belle: as Concha Argueello had been just a century ago, as Guadalupe Hathaway, Mrs. Hunt McLane, Nina Randolph, and "The Three Macs," had been in the city's youth; as Helena Belmont had been but twenty years before. She recalled the oft-told story of the night of Mrs. Yorba's great ball, in the house next to the one which was to be the theatre of her own debut, when Magdalena Yorba, Tiny Montgomery, Ila Brannan, and the wonderful Helena had been introduced to San Francisco, and the most distracting belle the town had ever known had turned the heads of fifty men. It was far easier to be a belle in that simpler time than to-day, when the San Franciscan vied with the New-Yorker in the magnificence of furnishing and attire, and a mere million was no longer a fortune. And the city more than maintained its old standard of beauty, for its population had nearly doubled; the handsome girls of the upper class had learned the art of dress, and even among the shop-girls there was a surfeit of pretty faces and fine busts. As to the demi-monde it was the pick of America, for obvious reason.