hat all the old
aristocrats fall over themselves to get invited to. I'd like to go there
myself, but of course I'm nobody. Hofer poses as a reformer, but I guess
this old town's too much for him--"

"Nicolas Hofer?" asked Gwynne, with interest. "I fancy that is the man
my mother met at Homburg and asked me to call on."

"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Paula, with a toss of her head. "If you are going
in for fine society you will soon have no use for us."

Gwynne, being unaccustomed to crudities of this sort, applied himself to
his oysters, while Isabel made a fierce resolution that she would find
another chaperon or remain in the country. She was disagreeably
conscious of craning necks, and although she knew that she was beginning
to excite interest in San Francisco, and was looking her best in a white
cloth frock and large white hat, she made no doubt that her
juxtaposition to the exotic Paula was the theme of more than one
unpleasant comment. While she liked Bohemia and was entirely indifferent
to shabbiness, she had never grown accustomed to vulgarities, and that
they should be embodied in her adopted sister filled her with a futile
wrath.

Stone hurried to his neglected party, waving his hand genially. He was a
very tall loosely built man, with a sensuous laughing mouth and an eye
that was seldom sober. He carried wine in his spirit as well as in his
skin, and if the latter had bagged a trifle under its burden, the spirit
was only depressed by the morning headache, and few men were more
popular.

"Know what kept me?" he demanded, as he doubled a huge Eastern
oyster--for the others Isabel had ordered the more delicate Californian,
but Stone's interior demanded a sterner nourishment. "Isabel, you are
famous. At first it was the men. Now it is the women too. It was like
you, dearie, to put Isabel opposite that mirror where everybody can see
her, but in which she looks just one decree further removed from common
mortals. Takes an artist's wife! No use, my sister. The Eggopolis must
take care of itself, the chickens be left to roost alone. San Francisco
wants you, and what she wants she gets--what is the matter, darling?"
The corners of his little wife's mouth were down and her chin was
trembling.

"You might have paid _me one_ compliment!" she enunciated, between anger
and tears.

"Good heavens, sweetheart, you are as familiar to them as Lotta's
fountain. You are an old story--and always beautiful," he added,
gallantly.