bile oil cans
made up the furniture of the room. There was also a little lime-spotted
canvas trunk that probably contained the mason's better clothes and his
extra tools. On the table was a lamp and a few soiled magazines, with
which Clark probably whiled away free hours when not disposed to descend
to the town for active amusement.

For a woman in Adelle's position such a workingman's home has the
interest of the unfamiliar. It is always incomprehensible to a woman
nurtured to a high standard of comfort to realize a totally different
and presumably lower standard of living. This may be seen when travelers
peer with exclamations of surprise and pity or disgust into the stuffy
homes of European peasants or the dark mud-floor rooms of Asiatics. The
prejudices of race as well as of social class seem to come to the
surface in this concrete experience of how another kind of human being
sleeps, eats, and amuses himself. With Adelle this sensation of
strangeness was not very keen, because her own acquaintance with the
habits of the rich was less than ten full years old. Clark's one-room
tar-paper shack did not seem so squalid to her as it might to Irene
Pointer, though Adelle had never before had the curiosity to enter a
humble dwelling. She looked about her, indeed, with a certain
appreciation of its coziness and adequacy. All that a single man really
needed for decency and modest comfort was to be found here, at least
under the conditions of the sunny California clime, which Providence
seems to have adapted for poverty. All the wealth of Clark's Field could
have added little valuable luxury to this tar-paper shack on the ridge
of high hills with a prospect of mountain, valley, and ocean before the
front door. Of course, with the assistance of Clark's Field, its
proprietor would have been sitting in the great room of the Pacific
Coast Club, as Archie was at this moment, imbibing foreign wine and
deploring the "agitation among the people," which was making a very bad
stock market.

After having taken in every item in the single room carefully, Adelle
went on her way full of thought. Her first impression was that the mason
must be a superior sort of workman because he kept his home and his few
possessions neatly and orderly. She did not know that there are many
naturally clean persons in the laboring-classes. However, she made no
fetish of tubbing herself once a day, and thought on to more important
considerations. Evidently