“But Rion Gracey’s not like that,” continued Rosamund, pursuing her own line of thought. “He’s just the same everywhere. I think he looks better down here. He looks as if he were somebody, somebody of importance. He even makes other people, that look all right when he’s not by, seem sort of small and insignificant.” “Whom did he make look small and insignificant?” said June suddenly in a key of pugnacious interest. “Jerry Barclay. I thought Jerry Barclay looked quite ordinary and as if he didn’t amount to much beside Rion. The things he said seemed snappish and sometimes silly, like what a girl says when she’s cross and is trying to pretend she isn’t.” “I don’t think it very polite, Rosamund,” said June in a coldly superior tone, “to criticize people and talk them over when they’ve hardly got out of the house.” “Well, perhaps it isn’t,” said Rosamund contritely, returning to her hearth-brushing, “but like lots of other things that aren’t just right it’s awfully hard not to do it sometimes.” The girls went up stairs and June was silent. Rosamund thought she was still annoyed by the criticism of her friend, and so she was. For deep in her own heart the thought that Rosamund had given voice to had entered, paining and shocking her by its disloyalty, and making her feel a sense of resentment against Rion Gracey. CHAPTER V THE GREAT GOD PAN In the spring in San Francisco the trade winds come and all wise Californians move inland. In the early seventies the exodus to the country was not noticeably large. Rural hotels were still small and primitive. To be able to evade the fog-laden breath of the trades was the luxury of the well-to-do, and the well-to-do evaded them by retiring to country houses which dotted the teeming reaches of the Santa Clara Valley, or sought the shelter of the live-oaks where the golden floor of the valley slopes up into the undulations of the hills. The Allens moved down early in April. Their father, after an afternoon’s excursion in a buggy with a real estate agent, came back one evening and told them he had rented the De Soto house, back of San Mateo, for three years, and they must be ready to move into it in a week.