The house itself, dropping fast into peeling, unpainted decay, was commodious, with the high, airy rooms that were built in the days when all Californians seemed to be prosperous, and space was not too valuable to be sacrificed to comfort. The rooms still showed traces of their fine beginnings. There were exceedingly bad and elaborate frescos on the lofty ceilings of the lower floor, and great mirrors incased in gold moldings crowned the mantelpieces. In the musty, unaired parlors, where the puckered inside shades of faded silk were always down to keep the sun from revealing the threadbare secrets of the pale old carpets and the frayed satin arm-chairs, the colonel felt as if he were having a nightmare of the old days. It was all so like in its largeness, its rich stiffness, its obvious expensiveness, but so terribly unlike in its stuffy, squalid, unclean penury. In the evening at dinner they met their fellow-boarders. The wide dining-room, with long windows opening on one of the many balconies that projected from the walls, showed the same frescos, the same pale, rose-strewn carpet, the same cumbrous pieces of furniture, that, forty years back, some mining prince had brought round the Horn in a sailing-ship. The smell of hundreds of boarding-house dinners hung in the folds of the dingy lace curtains. From a crystal chandelier, lacking most of its pendants, a garish burst of light fell over the table, where much plated ware and pressed glass made a glittering array on a dirty cloth. At the head of the board sat Mrs. Seymour, the landlady, and beside her her only child, Corinne, a sharp-faced little girl of eight, who, leaning with her elbows on the table, let her glance, shrewd, penetrating, and amused, pass from face to face. Mrs. Seymour, a large woman of a countenance originally buxomly pleasant, but hardened by contact with the world as the boarding-house keeper meets it, introduced the newcomers. They presented a curious contrast to their fellows. The colonel, whose social tastes had not fallen with his fortunes, was a trifle puzzled by the society in which he found himself. At the same time his gregarious spirit was cheered to see that there were other people in the house. He bowed to the lady on his right, introduced as Miss Mercer, with elaborate gallantry, and drawing out her chair, stood waiting for her to seat herself. The recipient of this unexpected courtesy did not know how to take it, for the moment suspecting some joke.