In San Francisco Gita was almost happy for two years. She enjoyed her school, the cool electric climate, the magnificent views, the drifting fogs, the long walks over the hills, and the Chinese cook’s admirable confections. Millicent’s friends were as faithful as she had anticipated, and Gita drifted into a semi-intimacy with girls who filled her at first with wonder and then with emulation. They were very modern young people, with the wisdom of the serpent, a fixed intent to do as they pleased, and a canny ability to take care of themselves. Gita, with her extensive and barely interrupted knowledge of the nocuous side of life and the hideous lust of men, at times felt old enough to be their grandmother, at others like the little sister of these amused and cynical maidens. Her mother had inculcated obedience, to one’s maternal parent, at least, as the first law of nature, and the only time Gita had ever defied her was when she had done her best to transform herself into a boy. She had been as severely chaperoned as was possible and admonished against all things unladylike, particularly cigarettes. It had been unnecessary to warn her against too free a manner with men as she hated all men, and never danced as she would have preferred to be embraced by a snake; but the consequence was that she had not the most elementary knowledge of flirtation. Flirtation, however, she was informed by her new friends, was out of date. Past was the day of subtle methods, of practiced coquetry, of recourse to every feminine device to win and keep a man, while he, poor dupe, played the hollow rôle of hunter. The girls called the “boys” up on the telephone as often as the boys called them, and even took them out to restaurants and paid the bill. This was the day of fifty-fifty, of equality of the sexes. Gita looked in vain for romance, still in a measure the mainspring of fiction. But these girls laughed at the word, in spite of the movies, where, in the intervals between parties, they took their followers of an evening; conversation, apparently, was among the lost arts. One young married woman told Gita casually that her husband, after a more or less desultory wooing, suggested they “hitch up,” and she had accepted him, not because she liked him better than several others, but because his type pleased her, she was in the mood to marry, and wanted a baby. By this time Gita had ceased to blush at a frankness which would have horrified her mother, and at one time herself, accustomed to the finesse of Europeans (when sober); and, with the plasticity of youth, superimposed something of a new self upon what she had believed to be a finished and permanent structure.