Catalina resolutely put the horror of those days behind her, and for several months was as energetic a woman of business as her mother had been. She was mistress of a great tract of land, of herself, her time, her future. When her stoical grief for her mother subsided she found life interesting and stimulating. She rode about the ranch in the morning, or conferred with her lawyer, who drove out once a week; the afternoons she spent in the great court of the old house, with its stone fountain built by the ancestors who had learned their craft from the mission fathers, its palms and banana-trees, its old hollyhocks and roses. Here she read or dreamed vaguely of the future. What she wanted of life beyond this dreaming Southern land, where only an earthquake broke the monotony, was as vague of outline as her mountains under their blue mists, but its secrets were a constant and delightful well of perplexity. For two years she was contented, and at times, when galloping down to the sea in the early dawn, the old moon, bony and yellow, sinking to its grave in the darkest canyon of the mountain, and the red sun leaping from the sea, she was supremely happy.
Then, in a night, discontent settled upon her. She wanted change, variety; she wanted to see the world—Europe above all things; and when her Eastern relatives, with whom she corresponded, in obedience to a last request of her father, again pressed her to visit them, and mentioned that they were contemplating a trip abroad, she started on three hours’ notice, leaving the ranch in charge of a trusted overseer and the executors of her mother’s will.
She found her relatives living in a suburb of New York, their social position very different from that her mother had given her in California. Nothing saved them from the narrow routine of the suburban middle class but the intellectual proclivities of Mr. Moulton, who was reader for a publishing house and the literary adviser of the pseudo-intellectual. Through the constant association of his name with moral and non-sensational fiction, his well-balanced attitude of piety tinctured by humor, the pleasant style with which he indited irreproachable and elevated platitudes, his stern and invariable denunciation of the unorthodox in religion, in ideas, and in style, and his genially didactic habit of telling his readers what they wished to hear, he had achieved the rank of a great critic. As he really was an estimable man and virtuous husband, of agreeable manners, sufficiently hospitable, and extremely careful in choosing his friends, his position in the literary world was quite enviable. The great and the safe took tea on his lawn, and if the great and unsafe laughed at both the tea and the critic that was the final seal of their unregeneracy.
When Catalina arrived, after lingering for a fortnight in Boston with a friend she had made on the train, she liked him at once, unjustly despised Mrs. Moulton, who was the best of wives and copied her husband’s manuscripts, hated Jane, and recognized in Lydia a human being in whom one could find a reasonable amount of companionship, in spite of the magnetism of the mirror—or even the polished surface of a panel—for her complacent eyes. Lydia was innocently vain, and, being the beauty of the family, believed herself to be very beautiful indeed. She always made a smart appearance, and was frankly desirous of admiration. Like many family beauties, she had a strong will and was reasonably clever. When the first opportunity to go to Europe arrived she had reached what she called a critical point in her life. She confided to Catalina that she was becoming morbidly tired of mere existence and hated the sight of every literary man she knew, particularly the young ones.
“Of course, they are more or less the respectable hangers-on that give us the benefit of their society,” she said, gloomily. “Those that scurry about writing little stories for the magazines and weekly papers—it seems to me a real man might find something better to do. We know all the big ones, but they are too busy to come out here often, and father sees them at the Century and Authors’ clubs, anyhow. We hardly know a man who isn’t a publisher, an editor, or a writer of something or other—perhaps an occasional artist. For my part, I’d give my immortal soul to be one of those lucky girls that go to Mrs. Astor’s parties; that’s my idea of life. If a millionaire would only fall in love with me—or any old romance, for that matter!”
“Have you never been in love?” asked Catalina, afraid of the sound of her own voice but deeply interested.
“Not the least little bit, more is the pity. I wouldn’t mind even being heart-broken for a while.”
It was this frankness that endeared her to Catalina. “Jane is third rate, and tries to conceal the fact from herself and others by an affectation of such of the literary galaxy as make the least appeal to the popular taste, and cousin Lyman is no critic,” she informed herself three days after her arrival. “Cousin Miranda is just one of those American women who are invalids for no reason but because they want to be, and I suppose even Lydia would get on my nerves in time. Thank Heaven, when they do I can leave at a moment’s notice.”
After four months of the friction of travel, Catalina had half hoped her relatives would reject her startling proposal and abandon her to a future full of dangers and freedom.