She always had, or at any rate so she pretended. She felt there was magic in that name and for that reason she lived there. Of all the suburbs of any city that ebb and flow through fashion, there is always one that manages to hold its own through pride of place. For San Francisco, Atherton was that suburb. Through the years its grandeur may have been whittled down to ostentation, but it was grandeur all the same, if you so considered it. And Lily Barnes did so consider it, deliberately. Once it had been nothing but a sandy waste of tidal land, yellow with straw and brown with dusty oaks. But in the 1850s, when the city had grown rich on fraudulent merchandise, those people who elsewhere were to be called robber barons had built for themselves to the south of San Francisco great wooden houses furnished from France and set in gardens which were without a fountain, despite the dry heat. That was Atherton and it was not without its glamour. Lily Barnes was born and raised a snob, but she had few illusions about her own status.
