Certainly in the matter of dress they were behind the fashions as revealed in Montgomery Street.

But when the brief solace afforded them by the modiste and dressmaker was past, there seemed little else to be gained.

They missed at first, I fear, the chivalrous and loyal devotion that had only amused them at Devil's Ford, and were the more inclined, I think, to distrust the conscious and more civilized gallantry of the better dressed and more carefully presented men they met.

For it must be admitted that, for obvious reasons, their criticisms were at first confined to the sex they had been most in contact with.
They could not help noticing that the men were more eager, annoyingly feverish, and self-asserting in their superior elegance and external show than their old associates were in their frank, unrestrained habits.
It seemed to them that the five millionaires of Devil's Ford, in their radical simplicity and thoroughness, were perhaps nearer the type of true gentlemanhood than these citizens who imitated a civilization they were unable yet to reach.
The women simply frightened them, as being, even more than the men, demonstrative and excessive in their fine looks, their fine dresses, their extravagant demand for excitement.

In less than a week they found themselves regretting--not the new villa on the slope of Devil's Ford, which even in its own bizarre fashion was exceeded by the barbarous ostentation of the villas and private houses around them--but the double cabin under the trees, which now seemed to them almost aristocratic in its grave simplicity and abstention.