Their period of highest recognized activity is from May till September, but before that, vagrant breezes, skirmishers sent out in advance, assault the city. They follow on still, sunny mornings, which show not the slightest warning symptom of the riotous forces which are designing to seize upon and disrupt the tranquillity of the afternoon. Eleven sees them up and stirring; by midday they have begun the attack. The city, in a state of complete unpreparedness, is at their mercy and they sweep through it in arrogant triumph, veiled in a flying scud of dust. Unsuspecting wayfarers meet them at corners, and stand, helpless victims of a playfulness, fierce and disconcerting as that of tigers. Hats, cleverly running on one rim, career along the sidewalk. Ladies have difficulties with parasols, heretofore docile and well-behaved. Articles of dress, accustomed to hang decorously, show sudden ambitions to rise and ride the elements. And those very people who in winter speak gratefully of the winds as “the scavengers of San Francisco” may be heard calling curses down on them.
Such a wind, the first of the season, was abroad on a bright morning in early April, and Cornelia Ryan was out in it. It was a great morning for Cornelia. Even the wind could not ruffle her joyousness. She was engaged. Two evenings before, Jack Duffy, who had been hovering round the subject for a month, poised above it, as a hawk above delightful prey, had at last descended and Cornelia’s anxieties were at an end. She had been so relieved, elated, and flustered that she had not been able to pretend the proper surprise, but had accepted blushing, stammering and radiant. She had been blushing, stammering and radiant when she told her mother that night, and to-day, forty-eight hours later, she was still blushing, stammering, and radiant.
It was not alone that she was honestly in love with Jack, but Cornelia, like most maidens in California and elsewhere, was in love with being admired, deferred to, and desired. And despite her great expectations and her prominent position, she had had rather less of this kind of delightful flattery than most girls. Walking down town in the clear, sun-lit morning, she was, if not handsome, of a fresh and blooming wholesomeness, which is almost as attractive and generally wears better. The passers-by might readily have set her down as a charming woman, for whom men sighed, and in this surmise been far from the mark. She had had few lovers before Jack Duffy. That matter-of-fact sturdiness, that absence of softness and mystery so noticeable in Californian women, was particularly accentuated in her case, and had robbed her of the poetic charm of which beauty and wealth can never take the place.
But to-day she was radiant, a sublimated, exultant Cornelia, loved at last and by a man of whom she could completely and unreservedly approve. There were times when Cornelia—she was thirty—had feared that she might have to go abroad and acquire a foreign husband, or, worse still, move to New York and make her selection from such relics of decayed Knickerbocker families as were in the market. She was woman enough to refuse to die unwed. Now these dark possibilities were dispelled. In her own state, in her own town, she had found her mate, Jack Duffy, whose father had known her father and been shift boss under Bill Cannon in the roaring days of Virginia City. It was like royalty marrying into its own order, the royalty of Far Western millions, knowing its own ramifications having its own unprinted Almanach de Gotha—deep calling unto deep!
The wind was not yet out in force; its full, steady sweep would not be inaugurated till early in the afternoon. It came now in gusts which fell upon Cornelia from the back and accelerated her forward progress, throwing out on either side of her a flapping sail of skirt. Cornelia, who was neat and precise, usually resented this rough handling, but to-day she only laughed, leaning back, with one hand holding her hat. In the shops where she stopped to execute various commissions she had difficulty in suppressing her smiles. She would have liked to delay over her purchases and chat with the saleswomen, and ask them about their families, and send those who looked tired off for a month into the country.
It was after midday when she found herself approaching that particular block, along the edge of which the flower-venders place their baskets and display their wares. In brilliantly-colored mounds the flowers stood stacked along the outer rim of the sidewalk, a line of them, a man behind each basket vociferating the excellence of the bouquet he held forward to the passer’s inspection. In the blaze of sun that overlaid them, the piled-up blossoms showed high-colored and variegated as a strip of carpeting.
Cornelia never bought flowers at the street corners. The town house was daily supplied from the greenhouses at the country place at Menlo. When sick friends, anniversaries, or entertainment called for special offerings they were ordered from expensive florists and came in made-up bunches, decorated with sashes of ribbon. But to-day she hesitated before the line of laden baskets. Some of the faces behind them looked so dreary, and Cornelia could not brook the sight of a dreary face on this day of joy. The dark, wistful eyes of an Italian boy holding out a bunch of faded jack roses, stiffly set in a fringe of fern, made a sudden appeal to her and she bought the roses. Then the old man who was selling carnations looked so lean and grizzled that he must be cheered, and two bunches of the carnations were added to the roses. The boys and men, seeing that the brilliant lady was in a generous mood, collected about her, shouting out the excellences of their particular blossoms, and pressing sample bunches on her attention.
Cornelia, amused and somewhat bewildered, looked at the faces and bought recklessly. She was stretching out her hand to beckon to the small boy with the wilted pansies, who was not big enough to press through the throng, when a man’s voice behind her caught her ear.
“Well, Cornelia, are you trying to corner the curb-stone market?”
She wheeled swiftly and saw her brother, laughing and looking at the stacked flowers in the crook of her arm.