The older women wore small
bonnets and cashmere shawls, lace collars and cameos, the younger
fichus and small flat hats above their "waterfalls" or curled
chignons. The husbands had retired with Mr. McLane to the smoking
room, but there were many beaux present, equally expectant when not
too absorbed.
Unlike as a reception of that day was in background and costumes
from the refinements of modern art and taste, it possessed one
contrast that was wholly to its advantage. Its men were gentlemen and
the sons and grandsons of gentlemen. To no one city has there ever
been such an emigration of men of good family as to San Francisco in
the Fifties and Sixties. Ambitious to push ahead in politics or the
professions and appreciating the immediate opportunities of the new
and famous city, or left with an insufficient inheritance
(particularly after the war) and ashamed to work in communities where
no gentleman had ever worked, they had set sail with a few hundreds
to a land where a man, if he did not occupy himself lucratively, was
unfit for the society of enterprising citizens.
Few had come in time for the gold diggings, but all, unless they had
disappeared into the hot insatiable maw of the wicked little city,
had succeeded in one field or another; and these, in their dandified
clothes, made a fine appearance at fashionable gatherings.
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