In one of the Japanese rooms there were decorated paper walls held up by light bamboo frames, amber paper shoji instead of windows, and the floors covered with tatami, the Japanese floor mats, two inches thick. You sit on the floor as in Japan and drink tea, while silks of every variety are brought to you.
We saw three rugs of the Ming Dynasty that are probably the oldest rugs extant. The most lovely one was of yellow ground, with Ho birds in blue. And there was an ice-cooler of cloisonné, Ming Period. They brought the ice from the mountains and cooled the imperial palace—years ago. Yet to hear Europeans talk, you’d almost be led to believe that ice is an American invention.
We were shown old Chinese velvet wedding-skirts and a tapestry of blues, with silver storks and clouds of an embroidery so fine that its stitches could be seen only through a magnifying glass, and poison plates belonging to the Emperor Ming that were supposed to change color if any food injurious to His Majesty were served on them.
One of the most beautiful things was a Caramandel screen of the Kang Hai Period, in a corridor that it shared only with an enormous lacquer image of the Buddha.
We were told that a rather famous collector went out to see the Fair. On his first day in San Francisco—he was stopping at the St. Francis Hotel which is only a stone’s throw across the square—he went idly into this most alluring of shops and became so interested he stayed all day. The next day he did the same, and the third morning found him there again. Finally he said with a sigh: “Having come to see the Exposition, I must go out there this afternoon and look at it, as I have to go back to New York tomorrow.”
I don’t know that this is an average point of view, but it is a fact that was vouched for, and also that his check to the detaining shop ran into very high figures.
Of the suburbs of San Francisco, Burlingame, I suppose, compares most nearly to Newport, of our Eastern coast, Sewickley of Pittsburgh or Broadmoore of Colorado Springs. It is a community of big handsome places occupied by the rich and fashionable. It strikes you, though, how much simpler people are in habits, in taste, in attitude, than in the East. Suggest anything on a house-party in Burlingame or San Mateo, or Ross, and instead of being answered: “What for?” or “Oh, not just now!” the response is a prompt and enthusiastic, “Fine! Come on!”
Young women and men in San Francisco, though many have more money to spend than they know what to do with, demand less in the way of provided entertainment than New York children in their earliest teens. A dozen of San Francisco’s most gilded youths stood around a piano and sang nearly all one evening. After a while someone played, and the rest danced. At Newport they would have danced, more likely than anything else, but the music, even if thought of at the last moment, would probably have been by an orchestra. One afternoon they pulled candy, and every day they swim in someone’s pool. Today at the J.’s, tomorrow at the H.’s. The girls play polo as well as the men and all of them, of course, drive their own cars.
In the J.’s garden, they have ladders against the cherry trees, and everyone wanders out there and eats and eats cherries—and such cherries! In the first place we haven’t any such cherries, and in the second, can you imagine a group of Newport women climbing up ladders and clinging to branches rather than let the gardeners gather them?