He
Is Easy Going, Witty, Hospitable, Lovable, Inclined To Be Unmoral Rather
Than Immoral In His Personal Habits, And Easy To Meet And To Know.
Above all there is an art sense all through the populace which sets it
off from any other population of the country.
This sense is almost Latin
in its strength, and the Californian owes it to the leaven of Latin
blood. The true Californian lingers in the north; for southern
California has been built up by "lungers" from the East and middle West
and is Eastern in character and feeling.
Almost has the Californian developed a racial physiology. He tends to
size, to smooth symmetry of limb and trunk, to an erect, free carriage;
and the beauty of his women is not a myth. The pioneers were all men of
good body, they had to be to live and leave descendants. The bones of
the weaklings who started for El Dorado in 1849 lie on the plains or in
the hill-cemeteries of the mining camps. Heredity began it; climate has
carried it on. All things that grow in California tend to become large,
plump, luscious. Fruit trees, grown from cuttings of Eastern stock,
produce fruit larger and finer, if coarser in flavor, than that of the
parent tree. As the fruits grow, so the children grow. A normal,
healthy, Californian woman plays out-of-doors from babyhood to old age.
The mixed stock has given her that regularity of features which goes
with a blend of bloods; the climate has perfected and rounded her
figure; out-of-doors exercise from earliest youth has given her a deep
bosom; the cosmetic mists have made her complexion soft and brilliant.
At the University of California, where the student body is nearly all
native, the gymnasium measurements show that the girls are a little more
than two inches taller than their sisters of Vassar and Michigan.
The greatest beauty-show on the continent was the Saturday afternoon
matinee parade in San Francisco. Women in so-called "society" took no
part in this function. It belonged to the middle class, but the "upper
classes" have no monopoly of beauty anywhere in the world. It had grown
to be independent of the matinees. From two o'clock to half-past five, a
solid procession of Dianas, Hebes and Junos passed and repassed along
the five blocks between Market and Powell and Sutter and Kearney - the
"line" of San Francisco slang. Along the open-front cigar stores,
characteristic of the town, gilded youth of the cocktail route gathered
in knots to watch them. There was something Latin in the spirit of this
ceremony - it resembled church parade in Buenos Ayres. Latin, too, were
the gay costumes of the women, who dressed brightly in accord with the
city and the climate. This gaiety of costume was the first thing which
the Eastern woman noticed - and disapproved. Give her a year, and she,
too, would be caught by the infection of daring dress.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 7 of 13
Words from 3023 to 3522
of 6242
