Caroline's daughters [antikvár]

One Caroline Carter and her husband, Ralph, as a couple are impressive, even imposing: perched at the top of a broad concrete flight of stairs, in one of San Francisco's prettiest, greenest and most elevated parks (the view is marvellous, hills and tall buildings, church spires and further high green parks), they draw a lot of attention from the stray passers-by, the dog walkers and strollers, on this bright April Sunday. For one thing they both look foreign, Caroline and Ralph, although Caroline has lived in this city for many years and Ralph is a native son. But now, out of the country for over five years, they wear mildly eccentric clothes. Caroline's heavy gray sweater (she expected fog) is un-American in design, as is the cut of Ralph's tweed jacket. Also, they are very large people, Caroline a tall fair woman, broad-faced, serene, with wide-set green-blue eyes and heavy gray-blonde hair—and Ralph a towering, massive man, once called "hulking" by a hostile press. Ralph is Caroline's third husband, and she his fourth wife—an unpropitious history, perhaps, but after twenty-five years this marriage seems to have taken: they look quite permanently married. And, almost rich and almost old, Caroline is back in a city where for many years she was young and almost broke, where four of her five daughters were born, and where she enjoyed a number of lovers. A lively life, then, and in its way romantic, although Caroline is eminently a realist, a practical, sensible woman. Or so she sees herself, generally. At the moment they are sitting there like tourists in the early