Might not a man seeing her there be disappointed when he met her as she
really was? She studied her face intently, viewing it at different
angles, judging it by the standards of her world. By these she found it
wanting, and with a wistful sigh she stretched out her hand and turned
off the light.

It was nearly midnight when she walked down the side streets that led to
the car line which took her home. Overhead the fog hung, covering the
city with a luminous rack which here and there parted, showing segments
of dark, star-dotted sky. Passing men looked at her, some meeting a
defiant stare, others a face so chastely unresponsive that they averted
their eyes as if rebuked. On the car she took an outside seat, for she
loved the swift passage through the night with the chill air on her face.
The grip man knew her and smiled a greeting, and as she mounted the step
she answered cheerily. Now and then as the car stopped he spoke to her,
leaning over his lever, and she twisted round to reply, friendly, frank,
intimate. Until she came to San Francisco his class was the best she had
ever known.

It was part of her economy to live in the Mission. She had two rooms
there in the old Vallejo Hotel, a hostelry once fashionable, now fallen
on dreary days. It fronted on a wide street where new business buildings
rose beside gabled houses, detached and disconsolate in the midst of
withered lawns. The Vallejo was a connecting link between these samples
of the new and the old. It belonged to the ornate bay-windowed period of
the seventies. Each of its "front suites" had the same proud bulge, and
its entrance steps were flanked by two pillars holding aloft ground glass
globes upon which its name was painted in black. Tall buildings were
unknown in those days; the Vallejo boasted only three stories and its
architect had never dreamed of such an effete luxury as an elevator.