The rain had come in a vigorous downpour, washing away the mantle of dust that had so long lain over the city. The storm finally settled down to a steady pelting of heavy drops, lightened occasionally to mild, drizzling showers, only to be resumed with greater violence toward night. Every one was glad for the flushing the town received. There was a novelty and excitement about the rain, a relief after the parched, monotonous months of cloudless skies. Men and women walked the streets smiling, the women especially; for that free, fearless gaiety, the almost abandoned good nature of San Francisco girls, was not to be quenched. On Thursday evening, Fancy Gray, to all appearance her old, gay self, smiling as if she had never a care in the world, went down to Fulda’s to dine with Blanchard Cayley. In a city of restaurants, Fulda’s restaurant was unique. The Pintos had discovered the place, and by their own efforts had made it. Maxim and the artists of the quarter had gained Fulda’s consent to a new scheme of decoration, a plan so mad and impudent that the room was now a show-place for visitors. The walls were covered with cartoons and sketches as incongruously placed, perhaps, as the embossed pictures on a bean-pot, but what was lacking in art was made up for by a bizarre, esoteric humor that was the perpetual despair of the uninitiated. Maxim’s chief contribution, a huge cartoon with caricatured portraits of his friends, had the place of honor; it was a superb piece of low comedy in crayons. Beyond this the sketches became more grotesque, the inscriptions more cryptic. Quotations from Rabelais, from Brantome, from Chesterton, Whistler and Wilde were scattered here and there, mingling with fiery burlesques of Bohemians, Philistines, lobsters and artists. No one, not even the authors, knew the point of most of these jokes well enough to explain them intelligibly, and it was this baffling suggestiveness which drew patrons to the restaurant and kept its charm piquant. One saw at each table new-comers with questioning faces pointing to legends in Greek and Esperanto and Yiddish, and wondering at the inscrutable accompaniment of illustration. It was a sort of mental and artistic hash spread upon the walls. The humor grew fiercer as one’s eyes rose to the ceiling. There, a trail of monstrous footprints, preposterous, impossible, led, with divagations, to a point above the central table which was always reserved for the Pintos. To crown this elaborate nonsense, they had drawn a frieze below the cornice with panels containing the names of the frequenters of the place, alternated with such minor celebrities as Plato, Browning and Nietzsche.