At the foot of the bluff she ran into a basement doorway to pin on her veil more securely, and dismissed psychology as incompatible with trade-winds and dust. A block or two farther on she took a cable car which slipped rapidly down the western slope, across the narrow valley, then up another and steeper hill, all blooming with flowers in the narrow gardens. She alighted at a corner half-way to the summit, and walked back to one of those curious San Francisco "Flat Houses" with three doors in a row. It was perched high above the sidewalk, for the street but a few years since was a gully, and the grading had deepened it. It was reached by some sixty winding but solid steps, and the little terrace, off at a right angle, was full of color. As she had expected, Mrs. Paula was sitting in the bow-window of her bedroom, gazing at the passers-by with a sort of idle eagerness. But so were a hundred others in sight, there being no idler creature than the American woman of small means, who neither belongs to clubs nor does her own work. The shallow philosophers harp upon the boredom of the idle rich whose every wish is gratified; but as a matter of fact the rich are seldom idle, and in highly organized societies are models of system and energy; whether misdirected or not, is beyond the question. It is the idle woman in a flat whose imagination riots along the highways of the great world, who keeps an avid eye for change of any sort, and finds a fictitious existence in the sentimental, the immoral, and the society novel. Paula, who lived in the top flat, ran down the two flights of stairs and opened the door for Isabel. "Well! you are a stranger!" she exclaimed. "I was wondering if your chickens had tuberculosis. Lots have in California. I read it in a Sunday newspaper." "My chickens are quite healthy. How are the children?" "As well as can be expected in this dusty windy city where they have to stay in the house half the day." Mrs. Stone's children were notoriously healthy, but she was of the stuff of which the modern martyr is made.