Anne sighed. She would have been glad to get out into the cool
winter afternoon, herself, after a long, quiet day in the warm
house. It was just the day and hour for a brisk walk, with one's
hands plunged deep in the pockets of a heavy coat, and one's hat
tied snugly against the wind. Twenty minutes of such walking, she
thought longingly, would have shaken her out of the little
indefinable mood of depression that had been hanging over her all
day. She could have climbed the steep street on which the cottage
faced, and caught the freshening ocean breeze full in her face at
the corner; she could have looked down on the busy little
thoroughfares of the Chinese quarter just below, and the swarming
streets of the Italian colony beyond, and beyond that again to the
bay, dotted now with the brown sails of returning fishing smacks,
and crossed and recrossed by the white wakes of ferry-boats. For the
Warriners' cottage clung to the hill just above the busy,
picturesque foreign colonies, and the cheerful unceasing traffic of
the piers. It was in a hopelessly unfashionable part of the city
now; its old, dignified neighbors--French and Spanish houses of
plaster and brick, with deep gardens where willow and pepper trees,
and fuchsias, and great clumps of calla lilies had once flourished--
were all gone, replaced by modern apartment houses. But it had been
one of the city's show places fifty years before, when its separate
parts had been brought whole "around the Horn" from some much older
city, and when homesick pioneer wives and mothers had climbed the
board-walk that led to its gate, just to see, and perhaps to cry
over, the painted china door-knobs, the colored glass fan-light in
the hall, the iron-railed balconies, and slender, carved balustrade
that took their hungry hearts back to the decorous, dear old world
they had left so far behind them.