Gwynne returned to Lumalitas on the following day and Isabel moved down
to Mrs. Hofer's. This had seemed a rather superfluous proceeding to Miss
Otis, but Mrs. Hofer would take no denial, and lodged her guest in a
suite the luxury of which at first delighted and then stifled her. She
liked splendor and luxury in the abstract, but some lingering shade of
Puritanism in her resented the enthralment of the higher faculties. Her
rooms were upholstered with satin from floor to ceiling, the
toilet-table was bedecked with gold, and the furniture had been made for
some favorite of Napoleon during the First Empire. Isabel was haunted by
a vague sense of impropriety, which she ridiculed but could not stifle.

And for the first time in her life she became weary of flowers. When she
arrived there was an abundance of the more costly in her boudoir--those
that were raised in hot-houses that the rich might not be balked in
their laudable desire to spend--and before the week was over, her rooms,
as she wrote to Gwynne--chuckling on his veranda--looked like a
florist's shop and smelt like a funeral. Everybody she met, and several
that she did not, sent her the floral tribute. The bell rang every hour.
When the imperturbable footman finally appeared with a box that looked
like a child's coffin, Isabel told him pettishly to throw it into the
back yard. All Americans send flowers to a pretty girl as a matter of
course, but the San Franciscan indulges in an avalanche where his more
economical Eastern brother is content with good measure, pressed down,
but not running over.

But the offerings were by no means confined to the young men that Isabel
met at the functions of the week. "Old friends of the family" were
interested to welcome to their midst the beautiful daughter (albeit
somewhat eccentric) of Jim Otis and Mary Belmont. Enthusiastic maidens,
and others--anxious to proclaim their delight in this sudden invasion of
their preserves--sent roses with stems four feet long and chrysanthemums
that looked like painted cauliflowers. After a tea at the Presidio,
given in the open square, and in honor of the descendant of its most
historic Commandante, Don Jose Argueello, that reclaimed precinct being
singularly prolific in flowers, the offerings arrived on the following
day in an ambulance.

It was an energetic week. When Mrs. Hofer was not herself entertaining,
she and her guest lunched and dined out daily, attended several teas
every afterno