elmont House" and did all that was
necessary in the present stage of Isabel's fortunes. She found the woman
house-cleaning and the old man weeding among the abundant crysanthemums
and asters in the half acre which still surrounded the old mansion. She
gave her orders and started for the home of her sister. A belated
trade-wind was screaming through the city driving the dust before it.
Isabel looked down at the towers and the domes, the steeples and walls
of the great modern buildings, the low city built in the days when San
Franciscans still feared earthquakes, all looming through the torn brown
veil like the mirage of a city infinitely distant. But San Francisco was
rarely more beautiful than in a dust-storm, which recombined her
outlines and the patchwork of her crowded generations into something
like harmony. She looked dreaming, proud, detached, an houri veiled to
allure, to inspire a new race of poets. Gwynne holding his hat on his
head with both hands, in the valley, cursed the climate, but Isabel
picking her way down the crazy old staircase, although in anything but a
poetical mood, paused a moment with that sudden outrush and uplift that
was the only passion she had ever known. Such moments were not frequent
and brought with them a sense of impersonality, as if she were but the
vehicle of aspiring passionate souls long gone from their own clay, that
rushed back through familiar conduits like volcanic fires, eager for the
arch of the visible world.

But ancestral rights had short shrift this morning. Isabel's spirit was
a very caldron. She not only still raged at the fact that for a few
seconds she had been as helpless in the grip of mere brute strength as
any peasant woman, but she was keenly disappointed that Gwynne had not
understood her. That he might have understood her too well, his whole
sex precipitating itself upon the new enemy, she would not admit for a
moment; women, with a sort of dishonest mental confusion, invariably
substituting the word misunderstood for failure to accept their own
point of view. Above all, was she furious with herself. Instead of
annihilating him with the dignity of which she possessed an uncommon
share, she had been surprised into behaving as if she were the crudest
of mere human creatures.

Moreover, her arms still pained, and she knew that they were black and
blue.

At the foot of the bluff she ran into a basement doorway to pin on her
veil more securely, and dismissed psy