transferred the lady to his own seat, and
engineered the girls out of the car, before two hoodlums, who were
working their way up from the lower door, could reach them.

They found a garage and a good automobile, and spent an hour or two out
on the ocean boulevard. When they returned to town, Miss Montgomery
alighted at one of the hotels where she was to dine; and, the chauffeur
announcing that he could not "make another hill," Gwynne and Isabel
started for home on foot.

The city rose in a succession of hills from the level, and they climbed
slowly, talking little. Suddenly Gwynne laid his hand on Isabel's arm
and stopped, directing her gaze upward. They were at the foot of one of
the narrow almost perpendicular blocks that rose between Pine and
California streets. On either side were brown old-fashioned houses,
several of them set back from the street, and surrounded by trees and
high close fences. It was almost dark, but a moon was due, so the street
lamps were not lit. Crawling down from the street above, on one side
only, and clinging to the upper houses, was the advance guard of the
fog. It had come in stealthily and halted for a moment, taking strange
shapes. It looked like the ghost of an ancient fog, and the very houses,
in which not a light had appeared, might have been deserted for a
century. In a moment it began to crawl down the side of the street,
seeming to fill the whole city with silence. It was a scene
indescribably gloomy, haunting, forbidding, and to Gwynne, who had
studied the city in many lonely rambles, to whisper of the unrelieved
gloom of lives behind that stage where the most famous of American
Follies danced for ever in her cap and bells. The spirit of sympathy was
in the fog and the brief darkness for the thousands of broken dogged men
and women that rarely caught sight of the cap and bells. For them the
ashes, the embittered memories, the blasted hopes, a quiet sullen hatred
for the city that had devoured their hearts and left them automatons.
This was a phase of the city's life of which the enthusiastic shallow
tourist had never a hint. It took a man of genius like Gwynne to feel
the genius of the city in all its sinister variety. He had hardly pieced
his impressions together as yet, but he told Isabel a little of what his
subconscious ego had formulated, and she had never liked him so well as
when she took his arm and they ascended into the sudden downrush of the
fog.

XXXVI