Explore "Patience Sparhawk and her Times" by Gertrude Atherton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Who Madge Sparhawk was before she married the Yankee rancher had at one time been an absorbing topic for dispute in Monterey. One gossip averred that she had been the dashing leader of the lower ten thousand of San Francisco, another that she had come from the Eastern States as the mistress of a wealthy man who had wearied and cast her off; a third confidently affirmed that she had been a brilliant New York woman of fashion who had gone wrong through love of drink, and been sent under an assumed name to California by her afflicted family; a fourth swore that she had been an actress, a fifth that she had been the high-tempered queen of a gambling house. On one point all agreed: she was disreputable, and John Sparhawk was a fool to marry her. However, they were somewhat disappointed that they saw so little of her. They were not called upon to snub nor tolerate her.
She rarely came into the town; never excepting on horseback with her husband, when her splendid beauty drew masculine Monterey from its perch on the fence tops,-where it sat and smoked and murmured the hours away,-and gathered it about her, stirring the diluted rill of _caballero_ blood.