She turned a bright face to him.
"Let's go out and walk in the sunshine. An empty house is so sorrowful. And I have heaps of things to tell you."
They walked slowly up and down the pleasant tree-shaded street, passing the homelike porches at which she no longer looked wistfully. Her mind was filled with the immediate, intoxicating future, and she tumbled out for Paul's inspection all her anticipations.
Mr. Hayden had refused her last story, about immigration conditions on Angel Island, and she had sent it to an Eastern weekly. Wouldn't it be splendid if they took it! And wasn't it a bit of luck, getting the "Post's" city editor to take her idea of a department for working-girls' problems?
And the new series—the series that was taking her to San Francisco. "O Paul, if I can only do it half as well as I want to! I'm just sure Mr. Hayden would take it. 'San Francisco Nights.' Bagdad-y stuff, you know, Arabian Nights. You've no idea how fascinating San Francisco is at night. The fishing fleet, going out from Fisherman's Wharf over the black water, with Alcatraz Light flashing across the colored boats, and the fishermen singing 'Il Trovatore.' Honestly, Paul, they do. And the vegetable markets, down in the still, ghostly, wholesale district at three o'clock in the morning, masses of color and light, the Italian farmers with their blue jackets and red caps, and the huge, sleepy horses, and the Chinese peddlers pawing over the vegetables, with their long, yellow fingers."
"At three o'clock in the morning! You don't mean you're dreaming of going down there?"
"I've already been," she said guiltily. "With one of the girls, Marian Marcy. I told you about her last week. The girl on the 'Post,' you know?"
"Well, I hope at least you had a policeman with you."
"Naturally one would have," she replied diplomatically. Absorbed in the interest of these new experiences, she had not thought of being fearful; without considering the question, she had felt quite capable of meeting any probable situation. But she perceived that she was alarming Paul.
It seemed safer to discuss the little house she had rented, the little house that hung like a swallow's nest on the steep slopes of Russian Hill, overlooking the islands of the bay and the blue Marin hills. Eager to take Paul's imagination with her, she described it minutely, its wood-paneled walls, its great windows, the fireplace, the kitchenette where they would cook supper together when he came to see her.