chology as incompatible with
trade-winds and dust. A block or two farther on she took a cable car
which slipped rapidly down the western slope, across the narrow valley,
then up another and steeper hill, all blooming with flowers in the
narrow gardens. She alighted at a corner half-way to the summit, and
walked back to one of those curious San Francisco "Flat Houses" with
three doors in a row. It was perched high above the sidewalk, for the
street but a few years since was a gully, and the grading had deepened
it. It was reached by some sixty winding but solid steps, and the little
terrace, off at a right angle, was full of color.

As she had expected, Mrs. Paula was sitting in the bow-window of her
bedroom, gazing at the passers-by with a sort of idle eagerness. But so
were a hundred others in sight, there being no idler creature than the
American woman of small means, who neither belongs to clubs nor does her
own work. The shallow philosophers harp upon the boredom of the idle
rich whose every wish is gratified; but as a matter of fact the rich are
seldom idle, and in highly organized societies are models of system and
energy; whether misdirected or not, is beyond the question. It is the
idle woman in a flat whose imagination riots along the highways of the
great world, who keeps an avid eye for change of any sort, and finds a
fictitious existence in the sentimental, the immoral, and the society
novel.

Paula, who lived in the top flat, ran down the two flights of stairs and
opened the door for Isabel.

"Well! you are a stranger!" she exclaimed. "I was wondering if your
chickens had tuberculosis. Lots have in California. I read it in a
Sunday newspaper."

"My chickens are quite healthy. How are the children?"

"As well as can be expected in this dusty windy city where they have to
stay in the house half the day." Mrs. Stone's children were notoriously
healthy, but she was of the stuff of which the modern martyr is made.

Isabel followed her up the stairs and into the large sunny front
bedroom. The children being invisible and also inarticulate, were
doubtless in the back yard. The room was vaguely untidy without being
dirty. A basket of socks and stockings in various stages of repair stood
on a table by the window, but pushed aside to accommodate the Saturday
society papers and a novel from the circulating library. An opera-cloak
lay across a chair, flung there, no doubt, the night before, and on the
floor clos