Transplanted by Gertrude Atherton — Read

Lee spent the following winter in New York and Washington, with friends of Mrs. Montgomery, who met and made much of her Del Monte. Her social success in both places was very great, and she carried off all the honours that an ambitious young beauty could desire. She met many men-of-the-world. The species rather alarmed her at first, but, after she had posed herself, they amused her more; in their way, they were as ingenuous as the callow youth of San Francisco. She returned to California wiser than when she had left it, and a trifle more subtle, but with an undiminished vitality of spirit, and with the romantic imp in the depths of her brain as active as ever. It had been Mrs. Montgomery's intention to join Lee in the spring, take her to visit Tiny, then to the great show places of Europe -- invented by a benign Providence for the American tourist; but an attack of rheumatism defeated the project, and Lee hastened home to her.

She was not sorry to return. The East quickly palls on the Californian of temperament and imagination, and before the winter was over Lee had begun to long for the mysterious Latin charm of her own country, and for its unvarying suggestion of unlimited space. Moreover, she feared to miss Cecil Maundrell if she went abroad at this time; his movements seemed very erratic, and his letters were brief and unexplanatory. He might change his plans, and come to California at any moment. Above all, she wanted to meet him on her own ground, in the country which had gone largely into the making of her; not in Tiny's drawing-room, surrounded by a conventional house-party.