Coming across the country to San Francisco, her train was wrecked.
In the smash-up a rude chair struck her just south of the belt line
and she fears brain fever from the blow. The alarm is not general,
for though just freed by kind death from an unhappy life sentence
of matrimony she is ready to try another jailer.

Whether he spied Dolly first and hoped that the gleam from her many
jewels would light up the path in his search for Truth and a few
other things, or whether the Seeker was sought, I do not know.
However the flirtation which seems to have no age limit has
flourished like a bamboo tree. For once the man was too earnest.
Dolly gave heed and promptly attached herself with the persistency
of a barnacle to a weather-beaten junk. By devices worthy a
finished fisher of men, she holds him to his job of suitor, and if
in a moment of abstraction his would-be ardor for Sada grows too
perceptible, the little lady reels in a yard or so of line to make
sure her prize is still dangling on the hook.

To-day at tiffin the griefless widow unconsciously scored at the
expense of the Seeker, to the delight of the whole table. For
Sada's benefit this man quoted a long passage from some German
philosopher. At least it sounded like that. It was far above the
little gray head he was trying to ignore and so weighty I feared
for her mentality. But I did not know Dolly. She rose like a
doughnut. Looking like a child who delights in the rhythm of
meaningless sounds, she heard him through, then exclaimed with
breathless delight, "Oh, ain't he fluid!"

The man fled, but not before he had asked Sada for two dances at
night.