Viola directed her course was almost as old as the locality where she had passed her uneventful girlhood. Boarding an electric car, she crossed the low basin of the town, where originally the village of Yerba Buena skirted the cove in straggling huts and tents. Here the business life of a metropolis is compressed into an area covered by a few blocks. Women do their shopping one street away from where men are making the money which renders the shopping possible. The car swept Viola through the gay panorama that Kearney Street presents on a sunny morning, out past Portsmouth Square, with a glimpse of Chinese back balconies, where lines of flowering plants, the dip of swaying lanterns, and here and there the brilliant spot of color made by a woman or a child, bring to the scene a whiff of the Orient.
Beyond, where the broken flank of Telegraph Hill rises gaunt and red amid its clinging tenements, she alighted and continued her way on foot. She made a detour round the forbidding steeps of the hill, past narrow alleys where shawled figures slunk along lengths of sun-touched wall, by old verandahed houses brooding under rusty cypress-trees, by straight-fronted, plastered dwellings, the stucco streaked with dark rain-stains like the traces of tears on a face too dejected to care how it looked. Finally the street rose over a spur of the hill,
