Nothing seemed left to Edward but San Francisco itself. Nothing was left that he could grasp; his personal hold on the happy city had disappeared. He felt as if he held a cold hard diamond in his hand. A diamond on the palm of the hand has no value, no value until another hand touches it or eyes desire it, or until it is set in a crown. All his days Edward sat alone with an aching head either in his room or in the lobby of the hotel. In the lobby he sat in the midst of overdressed painted women waiting for their beaux. They were all hostile to him and to one another. In revenge he dwelt on the fact that their hair, waved and padded under light nets, looked like wigs and that, though they looked angrily at one another, they all tried to look alike. Sometimes one of them would have an “adventure”; a strange stray beau would find a pretext to get into conversation and they would talk impertinently and with heavy facetiousness for a time. Edward sat morbidly rejoicing that he was as much different from them as it was possible to be. He even valued the pain in his head because it set him apart from them. One day a familiar face among the waiting women occurred like one of the dreams that he could not believe in. It was Mrs. Melsie Ponting but Edward ran to her like a lover. She quite obviously regretted his appearance; obviously she did not wish him to know whom she intended to meet there. She enjoyed the excitement of concealing something. She had a rendezvous with the medical student, Pike, whose face Edward had neither liked nor committed to memory. The danger of discovery by Edward, therefore, was very slight, but Mrs. Ponting fortunately did not know this. She loved petty danger connected with petty love. The excitement made her eyes look almost as large as they were painted. Edward leaned towards her eagerly and asked her for news of all his friends except Emily. “My dear, isn’t it exciting about Rhoda!” chattered Melsie. “I’m perfectly sure she’ll get the maximum sentence. She’s so high and mighty she doesn’t have any of the artifices that you and me would probably get away with. She won’t even come out of jail on bail. Avery Bird is mad. Everybody wants to find Avery to ask him for news, but he’s like a spook—you never find him unless you’re not looking for him, and then you see him speeding in a taxi down Van Ness towards the Hall of Justice. My dear, I must tell you a joke on Banner Hope—you know he is located in Oakland, but he doesn’t like to have us know it—who would? Banner vamped a flapper at Jove Pinelli’s and took her—where d’you think?—to Rhoda’s empty studio. This is how he squared the janitor——” “Melsie, tell me, where is Emily?” Melsie was affronted. She was glad that she had something to say that would hurt Edward. “Emily? Oh, Emily’s gone to China.”