Transplanted by Gertrude Atherton — Read

That same day she was installed in the old Montgomery house on Rincon Hill. It was a low irregularly built house, wooden, but substantial. The walls of the lower storey were panelled, and covered with portraits of Southern ancestors and relations. The furniture and carpets were worn, but as both had been bought in the golden days of Mr. Montgomery's career, before he, like Hayward Tarleton, had speculated and lost, they were of the first quality, and would last for many years to come. Moreover, his widow had picked up many bibelots and much antique furniture in Europe, which added to the reserved, aristocratic, and un-Californian atmosphere of the house. And her silver and crystal were the finest in San Francisco.

Mrs. Montgomery was no longer wealthy, but she was as exclusive as in the Fifties, when exclusiveness meant self-protection, and, if not a social power, a person whom it showed a proper pride to know. Mr. Montgomery had not lost his entire fortune, by any means, and what his wife and the unmarried children inherited was unencumbered. It was also sufficient to enable Mrs. Montgomery to indulge her passion for travelling, to educate Tiny in Paris, to give Randolph his leisurely choice of careers, to keep up the Rincon Hill and the Menlo Park property, and to enable the family generally to live as became one of the "old families of California," _i. e._, of the early Fifties.