That night Claire took an unusually long way round on her walk home.  Her path from the Falcon Insurance Company’s office on California Street to the Clay Street flat was never a direct one, first, because there were hills to be avoided, and, second, because Claire found the streets at twilight too full of charm for a rapid homeward flight.  The year was on the wane and the November days were coming to an early blackness.  Claire reveled in the light-flooded dusk of these late autumn evenings.  To her, the city became a vast theater, darkened suddenly for the purpose of throwing the performers into sharper relief.  Most clerks made their way up Montgomery Street toward Market, but Claire climbed past the German Bank to Kearny Street.  She liked this old thoroughfare, struggling vainly to pull itself up to its former glory.  The Kearny Street crowd was a varying quantity, frankly shabby or flashily prosperous, as far south as Sutter Street, suddenly dignified and reserved for the two blocks beyond.  To-night Claire missed the direct appeal of the streets lined with bright shops.  They formed the proper background for her broodings, but they scarcely entered into her mood.  She could not have said just what flight her mood was taking, or upon just which branch her thought would alight.  She was confused and puzzled and vaguely uneasy.  She had a sense that somehow, somewhere, a door had been opened and that a strong, devastating wind was clearing the air and bringing dead things to ground in a disorderly shower.  She was stirred by twilights of uneasiness.  It was almost as if the monotonous truce of noonday had been darkened by a huge, composite, masculine shadow, made up in some mysterious way of the ridiculous Serbian and his blood-red dawn, and this man Stillman, who had a wife, and Flint, with hands so ready to flick threads from her sloping shoulders.  Yesterday her outlook had been peaceful and unhappy; to-day she felt stimulation of an impending struggle.  She was afraid, and yet she would not have turned back for one swift moment.  And suddenly the words of Mrs. Finnegan recurred, “I guess we women are all alike.”  Were they?

At which point she came upon a pastry-shop window and she went in and bought a half-dozen French pastries.  The thought of her mother’s pleasure at this unusual treat brought her in due time smiling to her threshold.

Mrs. Robson was not in her accustomed place at the head of the stairs; about half-way up the long flight her voice sounded triumphantly: 

“Oh, Claire, do hurry and see what Gertrude has sent!  Everything is perfectly lovely.”

Claire quickened her pace and gained the cramped living-room.  Thrown about in a sort of joyous disorder, Gertrude Sinclair’s finery quite lit up the shabbiness.  Hats, plumes, scraps of vivid silks, gilded slippers, a spangled fan—­their unrelated vividness struck Claire as fantastic as a futurist painting.  Her mother seemed suddenly young again.  Claire wondered whether, after the toll of sixty-odd years, she could be moved to momentary youth by the mere sight of the prettiness that was quickening her mother’s pulse.