Always physical torture for Anne to assert her beliefs against opposition, the flush flamed to a brick-red burning, her eyes grew smaller, she looked hot and swollen. When Anne blushed like this she was ugly.
John Lowell moved impatiently.
"Really, Miss Mitchell, a law office is not a church. It is a business. Here is a big firm needing rock and gravel, easy to get and close to shipping facilities. Years ago, when the city was not much more than a village, a few people built some dilapidated shacks on Telegraph Hill. The Lord knows what they paid for the land, or whom they paid. Soon the growth of the city will force down these shacks. Morgan offers to buy them now, and unless you value them by the 'home and fireside, and baby's cradle' standard of every sentimental tenant, the price is a fairly just one. The people themselves, if not interfered with, will be glad to take what they can get. On the whole, they're a canny lot. They know that it's only a question of a short time before they'd have to go. A city growing like this has no room to waste so near its water-front in rotting cottages and little gardens. The place for small houses like those is in Ocean View, or the Portrero, or the Mission outskirts."
"But it would take the men hours to get to their work from those places and"—Anne shivered—"they're so dismal and bleak. Gray hills, and wind and dust. The Hill has the Bay and the islands and the ferryboats at night."
John Lowell stared in astonishment and then laughed.
"Really, Miss Mitchell, you alarm me. I'm afraid you'll be turning my dictation into poetry, and sending out letters in blank verse."
The laugh cut Anne's last grip from the hope that John Lowell had not really meant what he said. He was, then, deliberately doing this thing that he knew was wrong, for the money in it. He was going to tear away from these people perhaps the only external beauty their lives held. Safe in his own well-appointed home, with all the glory of Bay and hills spread out before him, he was going to condemn these to the gray, thick dust of the Portrero, the bleak and windswept hills, the dull, depressing streets of the Mission outskirts. All her life Anne had lived on such a street and hated it with the whole force of her nature.
He had the power to do this thing and he was going to do it. Under the suave kindliness of his slim, perfectly groomed figure, he was like an animal snapping at every morsel that came his way. The law suddenly appeared to Anne as a trick surface upon which one walked, ignorant of the complicated mechanism below.
Standing before John Lowell, not reaching above his elbow, she looked straight into the eyes smiling down at her with a new, appraising gleam.
"Well?" he said, "do you feel that you will be able to get them out in plain prose?"