Collis was so entranced with Sarah that at first he didn’t notice the dark, imposing figure who came into the box and stood behind her. But then he perceived through his opera glasses that there was a broad tanned hand on the back of Sarah’s chair, and he followed the hand to a wide white cuff, and then to an arm, and from the arm to a broad, immaculately tailored shoulder. He focused at last on a face, and it was the face of Laurence Melford, one of the most powerful of the California pioneers, a millionaire in gold, whisky, beef, silver, and real estate. A decider of destinies, and a political giant. From what he could make out, in the shadows of the Melfords’s box, he was heavy-jowled, stern, bristling with grey eyebrows, like General Zachary Taylor, old Rough and Ready, except that his mouth was softer. He bore himself with the exaggerated dignity that all self-made men affect, as a substitute for illustrious ancestors and a wealthy childhood. Collis could see him turning his head from side to side, not so much as if he was scanning the theatre for anybody he might happen to know, but as if he was generously permitting the audience to admire the various aspects of his craggy and handsome face.

Sarah raised her hand and whispered something in her father’s ear, and he bent over her chair. Collis could see Melford smile, and Sarah laugh, and he would have given fifty silver dollars to know what it was they were saying. He put down the opera glasses and looked across at Charles Tucker with an expression of appreciation, but of frustration, too.

‘The princess on top of the glass mountain, I’m afraid,’ said Knickerbocker Jane. ‘The only man who’s ever going to win her is going to have to be rich, and maybe titled, and at least as clever as Bret Harte.’

‘She’s right, Collis,’ said Charles. ‘That girl there is the living definition of the word “impregnable”.’

‘No girl is impregnable,’ Collis told him, smiling.

‘I think Charlie meant “inaccessible”,’ put in Sam Lewis. ‘But I guess the one goes hand in glove with the other, so to speak.’

‘They say she’s never even kissed a man,’ said Elsie, ‘and never been alone in the same room with a boy, not in the whole of her twenty years.’

Collis raised his opera glasses again, but now, rapidly and unsteadily, the auditorium lights began to dim, and the occupants of the Melford box were lost in darkness, except for the occasional glitter of diamonds, or the shadowy flutter of a fan. The orchestra struck up with a scrapy version of ‘The Dance of the Dryads’, by August Müschler, and with a loud mechanical whirring the drapes across the stage began to open. The audience applauded and cheered and whistled, and Collis wearily peeled off his evening gloves and prepared himself for an evening of provincial entertainment.