"Of course," he said, "all of them are not so fine as this." Alas for my imaginings, here was no rose-pink boudoir, no scene for a romantic meeting, but a room like one of those frightful parlor "sets" one sometimes sees in the cheapest moving pictures. However, in the movies one is spared the color of such a room; one may see that the wallpaper is of hideous design, but one cannot see its ghastly scrambled browns and greens and purples. As I glanced at the various furnishings it seemed to me that each was uglier than the last, and when finally my eye fell upon an automatic piano in a sort of combination of dark oak and art nouveau, with a stained glass front and a nickel in the slot attachment, my dream of a setting for sumptuous and esthetic sin was dead. It was a room in which adventure would taste like stale beer. My companion placed a nickel in the slot that fed the terrible piano. There was a whirring sound, succeeded, not by low seductive strains, but by a sudden din of ragtime which crashed upon our ears as the decorations had upon our eyes. Hastily I moved towards the door. My companion followed. [Illustration: The switchboard of the Chinatown telephone exchange is set in a shrine and the operators are dressed in Chinese silks] "If the gentlemans would wish to see some other apartments--?" suggested the obliging waiter, as we closed the door. "Oh, no thanks," I said. "This gives us a good idea of it." As we moved towards the elevator the waiter asked politely: "The gentlemans have never been in here before?" "No," I said, "we don't live in San Francisco. We had heard about this place and wanted to see it before we went away." "It is a famous place," he said. Then, with a shake of the head, he added, "But before the Fire----Ah, the gentlemans should have seen it then!" CHAPTER XXXIX AN EXPOSITION AND A "BOOSTER" The Panama Pacific Exposition will unquestionably be the most beautiful exposition ever held in the world. Its setting is both accessible and lovely, for it has the city upon one side and the bay and the Golden Gate upon the other. Instead of being smooth and white like those of previous World's Fairs, the buildings have the streaked texture of travertine stone, with a general coloring somewhat warmer than that of travertine. Domes, doorways and other architectural details are rich in soft greens and blues, and the whole group of buildings, viewed from the hills behind, resembles more than anything else a great architectural drawing by Jules Guérin, made into a reality. And that, in effect, is what it is, for Guérin has ruled over everything that has to do with color, from the roads which will have a warm reddish tone, to the mural decorations and the lighting.