This was the home of Malcolm Monroe, turreted, mansarded, generously filled with the glass windows that had come in a sailing vessel around the Horn.  Incongruous, pretentious, awkward, it might to a discerning eye have suggested its owner, who was then not more than thirty years old; a tall, silent, domineering man.  He was reputed rich, and Miss Elizabeth—­or “Lily”—­Price, a pretty Eastern girl who visited the Frosts in the winter of 1878, was supposed to be doing very well for herself when she married him, and took her bustles and chignons, her blonde hair with its “French twist,” and her scalloped, high-buttoned kid shoes to the mansion on North Main Street.

Now the town had grown to several hundred times its old size; schools, churches, post-office, shops, a box factory, a lumber yard, and a winery had come to Monroe.  There was the Town Hall, a plain wooden building, and, at the shabby outskirts of South Main Street, a jail.  The Interurban Trolley “looped” the town once every hour.

All these had helped to make Cyrus Frost and Graham Parker rich.  They, like Malcolm Monroe, had married, and had built themselves homes.  They had invested and re-invested their money; they had given their children advantages, according to their lights.  Now, in their early fifties, they were a power in the town, and they felt for it a genuine affection and pride, a loyalty that was unquestioning and sincere.  In the kindly Western fashion these two were now accorded titles; Cyrus, who had served in the Civil War, was “Colonel Frost,” and to Graham, who had been a lawyer, was given the titular dignity of being “Judge Parker.”

Malcolm Monroe kept pace with neither his old associates nor with the times.  His investments were timid and conservative, his faith in the town that had been named for his father frequently wavered.  He was in everything a reactionary, refusing to see that neither the sheep of the old Spanish settlers nor the gold of the early pioneers meant so much to this fragrant, sun-washed table land as did wheat and grapes and apple trees.  Monroe came to laugh at “old Monroe’s” pigheadedness.  He fought the town on every question for improvements, as it came up.  The bill for pavements, the bill for sewerage, the bill for street lights, the high school bill, found in him an enemy as the years went by.  He denounced these innovations bitterly.  When the level of Main Street was raised four feet, “old Monroe” almost went out of his senses, and the home site, gloomily shut in now by immense trees, and a whole block square, was left four feet below the street level, so that there must be built three or four wooden steps at all the gates.  The Monroe girls resented this peculiarity of their home, but never said so to their father.