could muster:

"Be kind enough to take her home. I will return the entire library if
you need it."

"Oh, I have finished. I am sorry you have been bored." And she carefully
gathered up her papers and went to the rescue of the weary Miss Boutts,
while Gwynne ordered the buggy. During the drive towards the paternal
roof Miss Boutts remarked casually that she didn't care about
Englishmen, but otherwise had little to say.

So ended the social regeneration of Rosewater.

XVIII

Gwynne awoke one morning with an irresistible desire for The Town in
every fibre of his being. Barring London he would have liked three
crowded days in New York, but as nothing better was available he felt
that he was open to the attractions of San Francisco. He had not visited
it since his departure on that brilliant Sunday after his arrival; he
had promised to wait for Isabel, and his interest in it was
intermittent. This morning he found his indifference culpable, inasmuch
as he had had three letters from his mother imploring him to increase
her income, and Mr. Colton had not only strongly advised him to tear
down the block of old structures south of Market Street, and put up a
great office building, but had offered to raise the money--selling half
the land and mortgaging the rest. And if Gwynne had not revisited San
Francisco he had a very accurate idea of its present conditions. It was
uncommonly rich, and its citizens, always sanguine of its future, had
been seized with a very fever of faith; they were selling out their
interests everywhere else and buying and building, tearing down and
rebuilding, until San Francisco threatened to lose its oddly patched and
wholly individual appearance and become the Western city of
sky-scrapers.

As Gwynne dressed he recalled his first impression of the city as he
crossed the bay: its singularly desolate appearance, in spite of what
at first looked to be a compact mass of buildings covering some thirty
thousand acres on hill and plain, and later as if a comet had rained
down pickings from every architectural quarter of the universe. He had
walked once to the back of the boat and looked at the line of little
towns and cities lying at the base of the eastern hills. They did
nothing to dispel the impression of loneliness. Whatever their
individual names they were mere annexes of the great-little city
opposite. When he returned to the forward deck the dust was blowing its
brown volumes through eve