Ancestors: A NovelAtherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn
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Ancestors: A Novel
Atherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn
British -- United States -- Fiction; California -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Love stories; Political fiction
The girls announced that they should ride back, and they walked over and
took a Third Street car. It was almost empty when they entered, but was
invaded at the next corner by a belated pleasure party bound for the
Park, a noisy disreputable crowd of flashy men, and girls with bold
tired eyes, a thick coat of the white paint which has made the fortune
of the San Francisco chemist, and gaudy cheap attire. Known in the
vernacular as "chippies," they bore a crude Western resemblance to the
Parisian grisette, and what they lacked in style they made up in sound.
They were the class that monopolized boats and trains on Sundays,
screaming steadily through the tunnels, and returned late, no longer
happy because no longer able to make a noise. One of the young women
pointed a finger at Gwynne, screaming, "I choose you!" and plumped
herself on his lap, to the suppressed delight of Isabel and Miss
Montgomery. But Gwynne looked blankly at her ill-buttoned back and the
immense buckle of her belt, while the rest of the party, those that sat
and those that swung to and fro at the straps, mocked her for choosing
so unresponsive a knight. The car stopped to accommodate another relay,
and Gwynne by a deft movement transferred the lady to his own seat, and
engineered the girls out of the car, before two hoodlums, who were
working their way up from the lower door, could reach them.
They found a garage and a good automobile, and spent an hour or two out
on the ocean boulevard. When they returned to town, Miss Montgomery
alighted at one of the hotels where she was to dine; and, the chauffeur
announcing that he could not "make another hill," Gwynne and Isabel
started for home on foot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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