Through the glass walls of Jessie’s veranda, chandeliers sparkled and elegantly-dressed men and women could be seen talking and laughing. Bret Harte, who came along later, observed, ‘There are more diamonds in this one house tonight than in the whole of South Africa, and enough silk to wrap up an elephant.’

It was one of those occasions which Jessie Frémont, as a hostess, enjoyed the most: an occasion when she brought together the wealthy, the socially graceful, the glib, the coquettish, and the pretty. She would mix them in ways in which they had rarely been mixed before, so that florid clerics would find themselves arguing with sallow-faced Sansome Street gamblers, and stiff-necked South Park ladies would find themselves provocatively entertained by tousled young radical writers. As a Northerner, and the wife of the last Republican Presidential candidate, Jessie had been treated warily at first by the Southern aristocracy of Rincon Hill; but her dinners and soirées had proved to be witty, glittering and bright, and were circled on the social calendar as emphatically as Mary Bell Gwin’s costume balls, or Isaac Friedlander’s monumental dinners.

Collis and Andy had arrived in a rented brougham at eight, after a couple of glasses of Pisco punch at the bar of the International Hotel. Collis, as he mounted the steps of the Frémont porch, looked unnaturally pale, and there were dark smudges under his eyes. But in his evening coat and his starched white collar, his pallor gave him the look of romantic dissolution, and from within the house there was a soft twittering among the fans and frills of South Park’s pioneer daughters.

They entered the brightly-lit hallway and crossed the figured marble floor. A black footman in a powdered periwig was waiting to take their hats, their canes, and their cloaks, and then another footman led them through to the door of the main reception room to have their names announced. As Collis saw the sparkling mirrors and spangled lights, and as he heard the warbling of courteous conversation, he felt a sharp twinge of nostalgia for New York. He felt like a man in a foreign country who suddenly hears a traveller speaking English, or who catches the smell of codfish chowder after years of curried lamb. He hadn’t attended a single society party since his arrival in San Francisco, and he had almost forgotten the pleasures of flirting with silly young girls, and of talking preposterous small talk with half-drunk gentlemen of wealth and position. After the way that Hannah had rejected him, and after his weeks among hardware-store managers and fussy middle-class women in Sacramento, his pride hungered for nothing more desperately than flattery from the opposite sex, and recognition from his social equals.

He stood tall, with his shoulders back and his chest well filled with air, as the footman called out: ‘Mr Andrew Hunt, and Mr Collis Edmonds!’