Copyrighted, 1898
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
As “American Wives and English Husbands”
New and revised edition
Copyrighted, 1919
By Gertrude Atherton
TO
THE LADIES OF RUE GIROT
BOIS GUILLAUME
TRANSPLANTED
TRANSPLANTED
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
MRS. HAYNE’S boarding-house stood on the corner of Market Street and one of those cross streets which seem to leap down from the heights of San Francisco and empty themselves into the great central thoroughfare that roars from the sandy desert at the base of Twin Peaks to the teeming wharves on the edge of the bay. On the right of Market Street, both on the hills and in the erratic branchings of the central plain, as far as the eye can reach, climbs and swarms modern prosperous San Francisco; of what lies beyond, the less said the better. On the left, at the far southeast, the halo of ancient glory still hovers about Rincon Hill,[A] growing dimmer with the years: few of the many who made the social laws of the Fifties cling to the old houses in the battered gardens; and their children marry and build on the gay hills across the plain. In the plain itself is a thick-set, low-browed, dust-coloured city; “South of Market Street” is a generic term for hundreds of streets in which dwell thousands of insignificant beings, some of whom promenade the democratic boundary line by gaslight, but rarely venture up the aristocratic slopes. By day or by night Market Street rarely has a moment of rest, of peace; it is a blaze of colour, a medley of sound, shrill, raucous, hollow, furious, a net-work of busy people and vehicles until midnight is over. Every phase of the city’s manifold life is suggested there, every aspect of its cosmopolitanism.