She looked her best and knew it. Relics of better days lingered in the bureau drawers and jewel boxes of these ladies as they did in the small parlor. That night they had been mustered in their might for Mariposa’s decking. She was proud in the consciousness that the dress of fine black lace she wore, through the meshes of which her statuesque arms and neck gleamed like ivory, was made from a shawl that in its day had been a costly possession. Her throat was bare, the lace leaving it free and closing below it. Where the black edges came together over the white skin a small brooch of diamonds was fastened. Below the rim of her hat, her hair glowed like copper, and the coloring of her lips and cheeks was deepened by excitement into varying shades of coral. As they entered the theater, Essex was aware that many heads were turned in their direction. But Mariposa was too imbued with the joyous unusualness of the moment to notice it. She had forgotten herself entirely, and sitting a little forward, her lips parted, surveyed the rustling and fast-filling house. The glow of the days of Comstock glory was still in the air. San Francisco was still the city of gold and silver. The bonanza kings had not left it, but were trying to accommodate themselves to the palaces they were rearing with their loose millions. Society yet retained its cosmopolitan tone, careless, brilliant, and unconventional. There were figures in it that had made it famous--men who began life with a pick and shovel and ended it in an orgy of luxury; women, whose habits of early poverty dropped from them like a garment, and who, carried away by their power, displayed the barbaric caprices of Roman empresses. The sudden possession of vast wealth had intoxicated this people, lifting them from the level of the commonplace into a saturnalia of extravagance. Poverty, the only restraint many of them had ever felt, was gone. Money had made them lawless, whimsical, bizarre. It had developed all-conquering personalities, potent individualities. They were still playing with it, wondering at it, throwing it about. Essex let his glance roam over the audience, that filled the parquet, and the three horseshoes above it. It struck him as being more Latin than American. That foreignness which has always clung to California was curiously pronounced in this gathering of varied classes. He saw many faces with the ebon hair and olive skins of the Spanish Californians, lovely women, languid and fawn-eyed, badly dressed--for they were almost all poor now, who once were lords of the soil.