A magnificent crystal chandelier depended from the high
and lightly frescoed ceiling and there were side brackets beside the
doors and the low mantel piece. Mrs. McLane may not have been able to
achieve beauty with the aid of the San Francisco shops, but at least
she had managed to give her rooms a severe and stately simplicity,
vastly different from the helpless surrenders of her friends to
mid-victorian deformities.
The rooms filled early. Mrs. McLane stood before the north windows
receiving her friends with her usual brilliant smile, her manner of
high dignity and sweet cordiality. She was a majestic figure in spite
of her short stature and increasing curves, for the majesty was
within and her head above a flat back had a lofty poise. She wore her
prematurely white hair in a tall pompadour, and this with the rich
velvets she affected, ample and long, made her look like a French
marquise of the eighteenth century, stepped down from the canvas. The
effect was by no means accidental. Mrs. McLane's grandmother had been
French and she resembled her.
Her hoopskirt was small, but the other women were inclined to the
extreme of the fashion; as they saw it in the Godey's Lady's Book
they or their dressmakers subscribed to. Their handsome gowns spread
widely and the rooms hardly could have seemed to sway and undulate
more if an earthquake had rocked it.
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