Remember, I doctor the nerves of all the women in San Francisco
and this is a hard climate on nerves. Wonder more women don't go to
the devil."
He kissed her again and escaped hurriedly. Those were the days when
women wept facilely, "swooned," inhaled hartshorn, calmed themselves
with sal volatile, and even went into hysterics upon slight
provocation. Madeleine Talbot merely wept. She believed herself to be
profoundly in love with her jovial magnetic if rather rough husband.
He was so different from the correct reserved men she had been
associated with during her anchored life in Boston. In Washington she
had met only the staid old families, and senators of a benignant
formality. In Europe she had run across no one she knew who might
have introduced her to interesting foreigners, and Mrs. Chilton would
as willingly have caressed a tiger as spoken to a stranger no matter
how prepossessing. Howard Talbot, whom she had met at the house of a
common friend, had taken her by storm. Her family had disapproved,
not only because he was by birth a Southerner, but for the same
reason that had attracted their Madeleine. He was entirely too
different. Moreover, he would take her to a barbarous country where
there was no Society and people dared not venture into the streets
lest they be shot.
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