"What do you mean?"
They confronted each other, Gwynne flushed and angry, Isabel coldly interrogative. Gwynne, who had been on the verge of an explosion, felt suddenly helpless. It was assuming a great deal to tell a woman that he saw through her plot to disenchant him with a rival. He could hear the descending whip of Isabel's scorn. Besides, it would mean a quarrel, and much as he resented her interference in his destinies, especially this last and most notable success, he had no desire to break up the even surface of their relation. So he merely shrugged his shoulders and said, with what calmness he could muster:
"Be kind enough to take her home. I will return the entire library if you need it."
"Oh, I have finished. I am sorry you have been bored." And she carefully gathered up her papers and went to the rescue of the weary Miss Boutts, while Gwynne ordered the buggy. During the drive towards the paternal roof Miss Boutts remarked casually that she didn't care about Englishmen, but otherwise had little to say.
So ended the social regeneration of Rosewater.
XVIII
Gwynne awoke one morning with an irresistible desire for The Town in every fibre of his being. Barring London he would have liked three crowded days in New York, but as nothing better was available he felt that he was open to the attractions of San Francisco. He had not visited it since his departure on that brilliant Sunday after his arrival; he had promised to wait for Isabel, and his interest in it was intermittent. This morning he found his indifference culpable, inasmuch as he had had three letters from his mother imploring him to increase her income, and Mr. Colton had not only strongly advised him to tear down the block of old structures south of Market Street, and put up a great office building, but had offered to raise the money—selling half the land and mortgaging the rest. And if Gwynne had not revisited San Francisco he had a very accurate idea of its present conditions. It was uncommonly rich, and its citizens, always sanguine of its future, had been seized with a very fever of faith; they were selling out their interests everywhere else and buying and building, tearing down and rebuilding, until San Francisco threatened to lose its oddly patched and wholly individual appearance and become the Western city of sky-scrapers.
As Gwynne dressed he recalled his first impression of the city as he crossed the bay: its singularly desolate appearance, in spite of what at first looked to be a compact mass of buildings covering some thirty thousand acres on hill and plain, and later as if a comet had rained down pickings from every architectural quarter of the universe. He had walked once to the back of the boat and looked at the line of little towns and cities lying at the base of the eastern hills. They did nothing to dispel the impression of loneliness. Whatever their individual names they were mere annexes of the great-little city opposite. When he returned to the forward deck the dust was blowing its brown volumes through every street that converged to the water-front. Those dust wracks, broken and narrowed by the buildings, lifted from the outlying sand-dunes, and following a law that had driven them eastward since California had risen from the deeps, had a curiously baffled, stolidly persistent expression, as if the old sand-dunes knew their rights and were determined to assert themselves so long as man left a yard of them free.
Gwynne, in his solitary moments, when even his law-books were closed, had recalled the stories of San Francisco, past and present, told him by Isabel, and they had given rise to many whimsies. California, he still all but disliked, but he wondered at the haunting memory of the city he had seen so briefly, and the odd almost pathetic appeal it had made to his sympathies. He had concluded that it was the pioneer taint in his English blood, and had blinked in sudden wonder before the fact of his close kinship, not only to that old romantic Spanish element, but to the brilliant adventurous lawless race of men that had made the city great and famous, then passed on into the kingdom of darkness leaving their moral rottenness in its foundations, and, pulsing above, all their old brave indomitable and progressive spirit. Although he had found it no rival to his studies and his ranch, still he had given it more thought than he was aware, and not only to its picturesque psychology, but as the seat of a possible business adventure. To raise a large sum of money on the San Francisco real estate—the common property of his mother and himself—and erect a great office building of steel and reinforced concrete, would add enormously to his own and his mother's incomes, but on the other hand it would stand in the midst of acres of wooden buildings and shanties, and the risk of a great fire—whose momentum would sweep through any fireproof building—was one forgotten neither by the insurance agents nor the chief of the fire department, who was said to keep thousands of tons of dynamite in the city with which to segregate the always expected conflagration. It was possible that no insurance company would take the risk on an expensive building in such a quarter. On the other hand it was as certain as the present wealth of the city, that such a building would have hundreds of companions in the next ten years, and the undesirable, immoral, and generally drunken element, so largely responsible for the continual fires of the district, would be gradually pressed to the outskirts of the city. He felt inclined to take the risk, even a sense of exhilaration in it, as if indeed the dead and gone Otises had invaded his soul and demanded one more bout on earth.