The Sisters-in-Law: A Novel of Our Time. E-book. Formato PDF Gertrude Atherton   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

The long street rising and falling and rising again until its farthest crest high in the east seemed to brush the fading stars, was deserted even by the private watchmen that guarded the homes of the apprehensive in the Western Addition. Alexina darted across and into the shadows of the avenue that led up to her old-fashioned home, a relic of San Francisco's "early days," perched high on the steepest of the casual hills in that city of a hundred hills.She was breathless and rather frightened, for although of an adventurous spirit, which had led her to slide down the pillars of the verandah at night when her legs were longer than her years, and during the past winter to make a hardly less dignified exit by a side door when her worthy but hopelessly Victorian mother was asleep, this was the first time that she had been out after mid night.And it was five o'clock in the morning!She had gone with Aileen Lawton, her mother's pet aversion, to a party given by one of those new people whom Mrs. Groome, a massive if crumbling pillar of San Francisco's proud old aristocracy, held in pious disdain, and had danced in the magnificent ballroom with the tire less exhilaration of her eighteen years until the weary band had played Home Sweet Home.She had never imagined that any entertainment could be so brilliant, even among the despised nouveaux riches, nor that there were so many flowers even in California.

Perch of the Devil. E-book. Formato PDF Gertrude Atherton   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

He had seemed to the girls of the only class he knew in Butte an even more romantic figure than the heroes of their magazine fiction, particularly as he took no notice of them until he met Ida Hook at a picnic and surrendered his heart. Ida, forced by her thrifty mother to accept employment with a fashionable dressmaker, and consumed with envy of the West Siders whose measurements she took, did not hesitate longer than feminine prudence dictated. Be fore she gave her hair its nightly brushing her bold un pedantic hand had covered several sheets of pink note-paper with the legend, Mrs. Gregory Compton, the while she assured herself there was no sweller name on West Broadway. To do her justice, she also thrilled with young passion, for more than her vanity had responded to the sombre determined attentions of the man who had been the indifferent hero of so many maiden dreams. Al though she longed to be a Copper Queen, she was too young to be altogether hard; and, now that her hour' was come, every soft enchantment of her sex awoke to bind and blind her mate.