At two o’clock on the afternoon of her party Mrs. Willers was giving the finishing touches to her rooms. These were a sitting and bedroom in one of the large boarding-houses that already had begun to make their appearance along Sutter Street. “To reside” on Sutter Street, as she would have expressed it, was a step in fashion for Mrs. Willers, who previously had lived in such ignominious localities as North Beach and upper Market Street, renting the surplus rooms in dingy “private families.” Her rise to fairer fortunes was signalized by the move to Sutter Street. Her parlor announced it in its over-furnished brilliancy. All the best furniture of the poor lady’s many migrations had been squeezed into the little room. The Japanese fans and umbrellas, flattened against the walls with pins, were accumulated at some cost, for they represented one of those strange and unaccountable vagaries of popular taste that from time to time seize a community with blighting force. Silk scarfs were twisted about everything whereon they could twist. The “lunch,” as the hostess called it, had already been prepared and stood on a side table. Edna, Mrs. Willers’ daughter, had made many trips up and down the street that morning collecting its component parts and bringing them home in paper bags. The ladies in the lower windows of the house had been aware of these goings and comings, and so were partly prepared when, at luncheon, Mrs. Willers casually told them of the distinguished guest she expected. The newspaper woman had not lived her life with her eyes shut and her ears closed, and she knew the value to the fraction of a hair of this information, and just how much it would add to her prestige. She was now fluttering about in a wrapper, and with a piece of black net tied tight over her forehead. Through this the forms of dark circular curls outlined themselves like silhouettes. Mrs. Willers had no war-paint on, and though she looked a trifle worn, was much more attractive in appearance than when decorated with her pink and white complexion and her spotted veil. Edna, who was already dressed, was a beautiful, fair-haired child of twelve. The struggles she had seen her mother pass through, with her eyes bright and her head high, had developed in her a precocity of mind that had not spoiled the sweet childishness of a charming nature. It would be many years yet before Edna would understand that she had been the sheet-anchor of the mother who was to her so clever and so brave; the mother, who, in her moments of weakness and temptation, had found her child the one rock to cling to in the welter of life.