I sometimes went to as many as four parties a week, so that in the morning it was all I could do to be up in time to see breakfast on the table. I found out that being a housekeeper meant more than long petticoats, and pouring tea. It meant being all over the house before ten in the morning, for, as Abby said, a house has a lot of strings to it, and unless you keep them all tied up tight something's going to sag. But I enjoyed my authority of the house, and my liberty abroad seemed like license to me. I felt launched on a wide sea of life.
The city itself was changed to my new horizon. It was larger, more complicated, with more masts in the harbor, new streets and horse-car lines, and every one moved about in it like the pieces of a Chinese puzzle. The friends who had lived close about us had all moved westward or southward with the trend of the city, and between Telegraph and Chestnut Street Hills there were some very, fine houses. I was often running over there to see Hallie or Estrella, and my shortest way lay past the convent that stood a little apart in the middle of the settlement. Next to it, but facing on another street, was a house which had been built at the same time as the convent. The convent wall came up at its back. On the other three sides was a high fence. Over the fence only the upper story could be seen, and it had a look so still and closed up, that it brought back to me that feeling of mystery the city used to give me as a child. But I never noticed or wondered about it particularly until one day when I saw an open carriage waiting in front of the steps.
While I was looking a woman came out of the gate, and got into the carriage. She was Spanish, I saw at a glance, and big, and all in sweeping black, but instead of being dark she was tawny, with a wonderful glow of copper-colored hair through her black lace veil, and in all my life I had never seen a creature move so gracefully as she. It was like watching a beautiful cat. I asked Estrella Mendez who she was, and Estrella blushed, and said she did not know. And when I asked was she sure, because I knew the woman was Spanish, Estrella got quite angry, and said she wasn't supposed to know all the Spanish people in the city, and especially if they didn't have husbands. That surprised me, for the woman had looked quite like a great lady, and when I went home I spoke to father about it.
He said he feared Estrella was right—we none of us knew the Spanish woman. "But," I told him, "she looks like a queen; and she has a beautiful carriage." He laughed and said yes, she had money, and a good deal of influence in high places, but the women she knew were not the sort of people I would care about; and he finished by saying I was a silly child to go staring at strange "greasers."
I did hate to have father laugh at me, but I couldn't help looking at her slyly when now and then I saw her about the city. She was like no other Spanish woman I had ever seen. Most of them are as white as callas, powdered over the lashes; but you could see the strong bloom of her skin even through the thick coat of rice powder she wore, and her lashes were lovely. I noticed that because she kept them half down, and looked out through them. But the most fascinating thing about her was the way she moved, like something flowing; and once in a shop I heard her speak, and her voice was so attractive, sweet and rather thick, with such a gracious, petting sound to it! But she was always alone. With it all she seemed to be mysterious, like her quiet closed-up house. I got to making up stories about her, and sometimes in my room, in front of my mirror, I practised looking out through my lashes. But it was a nuisance, for though they weren't short they curled back so suddenly that it didn't look right; and my hair being blond and flying into corkscrews, and my being so little, and forgetting not to step on my flounces when I tried to "sweep," altogether made it rather a failure, in spite of the black lace shawl.
But though I thought about her I didn't say anything more to father or Abby, because questions that hadn't bothered them when I was little seemed to worry them now. Father was for ever talking of the things I must not do. One was not to be about in our neighborhood alone. It was changing. And above all never to go over to Dupont Street, for that, he said was getting to be notorious, and he hated to have it so near. It was only a block below us, but it seemed to me very quiet, and though Mr. Rood's gambling-house was on the corner there was never any noise there, only such fine young men, and some that I knew, all the time going in and out of it.
But that pleased father least of anything, and he asked me how would I like to move over to the North Beach district, where all my friends were. Talking it over with Hallie and Estrella I liked the idea very much. But when I came home again to the old house, with the long windows, and the palm, and the long steps up to the conservatory, and all the rooms I knew, the very idea that I could have thought for a moment of going away from it gave me a lump in my throat.
So I had to tell father that I couldn't. He pinched my cheek, and said: "Next year, then;" and so we stayed on. This was in February, 1865.