"Have you no nurse?" she asked.
"Oh yes. She has been threatening to leave—has been fearfully disagreeable—but I suppose she will stay, now that I can pay her." Mrs. Paula wisely gave up the point and invited her visitor to remain for luncheon. But Isabel rose hastily.
"I must go home and see that everything is in order—the beds aired, and lunch prepared for Mr. Gwynne in case he should turn up. Then you will come about four? And we will dine out somewhere?"
"I'll pack all the decent things I possess and send them up right away. Fortunately the dress Lyster gave me last month is quite fresh, so I shall not feel too small beside your magnificence, and I am sure that Mr. Gwynne, even if he is an Englishman, does not dress any better than Lyster."
"Not a bit. We shall have some jolly times together. Mr. Gwynne is very anxious to meet you."
"Well, he has not been in any particular hurry. Still, it will be fearfully nice, and I am so glad you have come down at last."
XX
It was characteristic of Mrs. Paula that she was not in the least jealous of Isabel's beauty. She was quite positive that no man would hesitate between her own exuberant prettiness and a face and form that looked as if it had stepped down from a dingy old canvas. It was true that Stone admired Isabel—with reservations to his wife—and had openly avowed his intention to paint her when he emerged from the tyranny of the pot-boiler. He had hoped that Isabel would take the graceful hint and order a portrait, but Isabel had succumbed to the pleadings of too many students of indifferent talent, and had no intention of undergoing the ordeal of sittings again to any but a master. To-night, as the party of four entered The Poodle Dog—the socially successful offspring of the still enterprising and disreputable parent on the dark slope above—Paula deliberately outstripped her companions and appropriated the seat, at the corner table reserved for them, that faced the room. Isabel was only too delighted to turn her back upon the staring people, for it had occurred to her to-night, for the first time, to be uneasily ashamed of her adopted relative. She had gone about with her several times since her return from Europe, and absently disapproved of a somewhat eccentric tendency in dress, but to all sorts of odd costuming she had grown accustomed during her experience of art circles abroad. This evening, as she stood in her living-room with Gwynne and watched Paula sail down the broad staircase, she had a sudden vision of the shanty at the northern base of Russian Hill where Mrs. Belmont had found her little Mexican seamstress, deserted by her American husband, wailing over the child she was about to leave. This story had always inspired Isabel with the profoundest pity, tempering her frequent impatience and disgust towards the family alien, but to-night she wished for a few moments that her mother had sent Paula to a foundling asylum. She glanced uneasily at Gwynne and fancied she could hear him slam the lid of his breeding upon a supercilious sputter. Mrs. Paula's skirt and the jacket on her arm were a respectable brown, but there was something in the screaming red blouse, the immense cheap red hat, the blazing cheeks, the pinched waist between swelling bust and hips, the already lifted skirt—Paula always wore a train that she might at the same time achieve longer lines and more subtle opportunities—exhibiting the pointed bronze slipper with a large red bow and much open work above, that suggested, if not the French cocotte, at least that San Francisco variety known in local parlance as "South of Market Street Chippy." She did not bear the remotest likeness to a lady. She looked common, fast. Isabel wondered that she had never faced the truth before. It was as if a wave of final criticism heaved from the brain of the man whose life had been passed in the best societies of the world across to hers. But Gwynne was imperturbable and polite, and as they rode down-town in the bright cars Paula thought him "fearfully nice" and was quite sure that he admired her.
"We are fearfully late," she remarked, complacently, as she seated herself and looked slowly around the big room with its ornate frescoes and heavy chandeliers, its crowded tables and strange assortment of types. "But it is much nicer—to see them all at once, I mean," she added, untruthfully.