"Oh!" cried Mrs. Hofer, in a light, high, cultivated, but nasal voice, with a slightly English accent. "You _are_ sweet! I had intended to call in state the first time I could think of a decent excuse, for I have simply been mad--_mad_--to know you. But last night I told Mr. Hofer that my slender stock of patience had gone--flown--evaporated. I could hardly wait till this afternoon! Do you think I'm unconventional? I'm not really, except when I'm abroad--never here. Nobody is so conventional as the San Franciscan at home." Isabel was smiling and trying to guide her up the steps. "I am more glad than I can say to know you, at last," she said. "Do come into my house." "Let me rest a bit. The breath is out of me with the climb and the fright. Yes, fright, and it takes a good deal to phaze me. But you're the sensation of the town, my dear. There have been all sorts of plans to get hold of you. People are simply mad--_mad_! I was just bound I'd be the first. Not petty social ambition, not a bit of it. I wanted to know you. And I stayed in a country-house in England just after you, last year. To think that you could have married Lord Hexam. Oh, what a jewel of a house! I went simply mad over those white rooms in London." Isabel had firmly piloted her up the steps and into the house, and Mrs. Hofer sat on the edge of a chair like a bird on a bough, her merry shrewd sweet eyes devouring Isabel's face. "Oh, but I've wanted to know you! You don't know what this means to me!" "But why?" asked Isabel, much amused. "I am nobody." "Oh, just aren't you, though? Why, you're almost the last of the old San Francisco Knickerbockers, so to speak. That is, the last that has inherited any of the beauty one is always hearing about from the old beaux. And most of them have gone under anyhow--in the cheerful California fashion: three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. Of course there are some left, but the most interesting thing about them is that they have been forced to open their houses to the likes of us--or sit down and talk to empty chairs. But the old Spanish blood is what interests us most. It was quite forgotten--all that old life--for about two generations; but now it's the fashion to remember it, and everything else early Californian. To think that you are a niece, so to speak, of the first nun in California, who had that romantic love affair with that Russian--I never could pronounce his name. That's not what interests _me_ most, though. It's _you_. To think what you've done! Those chickens! My man in the market has orders to send me Old Inn chickens and eggs, on penalty of losing my custom. All the _blasee_ girls--the San Francisco girls _do_ get so _blasee_, poor things--are threatening to go in for chickens. It would be a lot better for them than bridge. It is quite shocking the way they do gamble. Talk about early times!"