The city rose in a succession of hills from the level, and they climbed slowly, talking little. Suddenly Gwynne laid his hand on Isabel's arm and stopped, directing her gaze upward. They were at the foot of one of the narrow almost perpendicular blocks that rose between Pine and California streets. On either side were brown old-fashioned houses, several of them set back from the street, and surrounded by trees and high close fences. It was almost dark, but a moon was due, so the street lamps were not lit. Crawling down from the street above, on one side only, and clinging to the upper houses, was the advance guard of the fog. It had come in stealthily and halted for a moment, taking strange shapes. It looked like the ghost of an ancient fog, and the very houses, in which not a light had appeared, might have been deserted for a century. In a moment it began to crawl down the side of the street, seeming to fill the whole city with silence. It was a scene indescribably gloomy, haunting, forbidding, and to Gwynne, who had studied the city in many lonely rambles, to whisper of the unrelieved gloom of lives behind that stage where the most famous of American Follies danced for ever in her cap and bells. The spirit of sympathy was in the fog and the brief darkness for the thousands of broken dogged men and women that rarely caught sight of the cap and bells. For them the ashes, the embittered memories, the blasted hopes, a quiet sullen hatred for the city that had devoured their hearts and left them automatons. This was a phase of the city's life of which the enthusiastic shallow tourist had never a hint. It took a man of genius like Gwynne to feel the genius of the city in all its sinister variety. He had hardly pieced his impressions together as yet, but he told Isabel a little of what his subconscious ego had formulated, and she had never liked him so well as when she took his arm and they ascended into the sudden downrush of the fog. XXXVI Gwynne returned to Lumalitas on the following day and Isabel moved down to Mrs. Hofer's. This had seemed a rather superfluous proceeding to Miss Otis, but Mrs. Hofer would take no denial, and lodged her guest in a suite the luxury of which at first delighted and then stifled her. She liked splendor and luxury in the abstract, but some lingering shade of Puritanism in her resented the enthralment of the higher faculties. Her rooms were upholstered with satin from floor to ceiling, the toilet-table was bedecked with gold, and the furniture had been made for some favorite of Napoleon during the First Empire. Isabel was haunted by a vague sense of impropriety, which she ridiculed but could not stifle.