"You can look at what you like," said Isabel, indifferently. "I shall look at my stars. _Madre de Dios!_ as our Spanish ancestors would have said. _Ay yi! Valgame Dios! Dios de mi alma! Dios de mi vida!_ I never was so happy in my life." Gwynne walked about the large old-fashioned room with its bow-window, and alcove for the bed. He had half expected that the room he had so often passed with reluctant steps would be furnished in blue or pink, but it was as red as that of the traditional queen. Isabel had brought up all the old crimson damask curtains that had been fashionable in her grandmother's time, and covered the windows and walls of her bedroom, even the head of the mahogany four-poster in which her mother and herself had been born. The carpet was new, but a dull crimson, like the faded hangings, and the dressing-table with its quantity of chased silver--one of the few inheritances she had managed to retain--was the only spot of light in the rather sombre room: it was all white muslin and bright crimson silk. There was an old-fashioned settle against the wall and three stiff chairs. Gwynne liked the room, and had a vague feeling that he knew Isabel a little better. Certainly it expressed a side of her of which he had caught but an occasional glimpse. He pulled the curtains apart and shading his eyes from the light of the room looked down towards the city. It had vanished under a sea of white fog that broke against the ledge of Nob Hill. A cable-car might have been a comet flashing along the edge of a void. "I wonder," he said, "I wonder--should San Francisco disappear--be burned by that fire you are always expecting--or if the bay should shoal, or the Golden Gate rush together, so that she would have no reason for existence, and gradually be devoured by time--I suppose the fog and the winds would still be faithful. I can imagine the fogs rolling in and embracing her, and the winds raging about every forgotten corner, centuries after there was anybody left to curse either." "Was it Mrs. Kaye or Lady Cecilia Spence that said you just missed being a poet? I hope some slumbering ancestor is not struggling for resurrection out here. I much prefer that you should be a statesman." "I intend to be, nor have I any desire to turn poet. I have seen too many in London. But this city, ugly as it is, appeals in its own way to the imagination--more, for some unknown reason, than the most poetic I ever saw in the old worlds. There is something almost uncanny about it. While it is raw, and crude, and practically in its infancy, it at the same time suggests an unthinkable antiquity. Perhaps--who knows?--it had a civilization contemporary with the Montezumas--or with Atlantis; and it is the ghosts of old unrecorded peoples that linger and give one a fairly haunted feeling when one climbs these hills alone at night."