He was accompanied by a—­female, much taller than he, and as stalwart as dear woman can be; an especially common-looking person, bungled as to her dress, which was tawdry-fine, unseasonable for the place as well as time, inappropriate to herself, inharmonious in its composition, and every way most vilely put on; a clumsy and, as I presently perceived, a loud person, whose face, still showing traces of the coarse but decided beauty it must once have possessed, fell far short of compensating for the complete gracelessness of her presence.

Her eyes had a bibulous quality, and the bright redness of her nose vied vulgarly with the rusty redness of her cheeks.  I suspected her complexion of potations, but charitably let it off with—­beer; for she was, at first glance, English.  As she jerked off her flaunting bonnet, and dragged off her loud shawl, saluting me, as she did so, with an overdone obeisance, she said, “This San Fanfrisko”—­why would she, how could she, always twist the decent name of the metropolis of the Pacific into such an absurd shape?—­“was a norrid ’ole; she happealed to the gentleman,”—­meaning me,—­“didn’t ’e find it a norrid ’ole, habsolutely hawful?” And then she went clattering among tinware and crockery, and snubbed the gentlemanly boy in a sort of tender Billingsgate.

While she was thus gracefully employed, the agonized artist, his face suffused with blushes and fairly ghastly with an enforced smile, was painfully struggling to abstract himself, by changing the places of things, shifting the position of his easel, prying in a lost way into lumbered corners, and pretending to be in search of something, —­ingenious, but unable to disguise his chagrin.  He pranced with his legs, and tumbled his hair, and twitched at his whiskers more than ever, as he said,—­

“My dear,” (and the boy had called her Mamma; so, then, it must be a fancy sketch, after all,) “my dear, no doubt the gentleman is more a cosmopolite than yourself, and blessed with more facility in adapting himself to circumstances.”

“You know, Madam,” I came to his assistance, “we Americans have a famous trick of living and enjoying a little in advance, of ’going ahead’ of the hour, as it were.  We find in San Francisco rather what it promises to be than what it is, and we take it at its word.”

“Oh, pray, don’t mention Americans!  I positively ’ate the hodious people.  I confess I ’ave a hinsurmountable prejudice hagainst the race; you are not haware that I am Hinglish.  I think I might endure heven San Fanfrisko, if it were not for the Americans.  Are you an American?”

Alternating between the pallor of rage and the flush of mortification, her husband now turned, with a calmness that had something of desperation in it, and saved me the trouble and the pain of replying, by asking, in the frigid tone of one who resented my presence as the cause of his shame,—­

“Did you wish to see me on business, Sir? and have you been waiting long?”