“I don’t remember her very well,” he said; “a boy wouldn’t.  She died soon after that summer, and the boys went off to school.”

“Yes, I know,” the lady said thoughtfully.  “I had the news in Rome—­ a hot, bright, glaring day.  It was nearly a month after her death, then.  And even then, I said to myself that I’d come back here, some day.  But it’s not been possible until now; and now,” her voice was bright and steady again, “here I am.  And I don’t like to hear an old friend abusing Santa Paloma.”

“It’s a nice enough place,” Barry admitted, “but the people are—­ well, you wait until you meet the women!  Perhaps they’re not much worse than women everywhere else, but sometimes it doesn’t seem as if the women here had good sense.  I don’t mean the nice quiet ones who live out on the ranches and are bringing up a houseful of children, but this River Street crowd.”

“Why, what’s the matter with them?” asked Mrs. Burgoyne with vivacity.

“Oh, I mean this business of playing bridge four afternoons a week, and running to the club, and tearing around in motor-cars all day Sunday, and entertaining the way they think people do it in New York, and getting their dresses in San Francisco instead of up here,” Barry explained disgustedly.  “Some of them would be nice enough if they weren’t trying to go each other one better all the time; when one gets a thing the others have all got to have it, or have something nicer.  Take the Browns, now, your neighbors there—­”

“In the shingled house, with the babies swinging on the gate as we came by?”

“Yes, that’s it.  They’ve got four little boys.  Doctor Brown is a king; everybody worships him, and she’s a sweet little woman; but of course she’s got to strain and struggle like the rest of them.  There’s a Mrs. Willard White in this town—­that big gray-shingled place down there is their garage—­and she runs the whole place.  She’s always letting the others know that hobbles are out, and everything’s got to hang from the shoulder—­”

“Very good!” laughed Mrs. Burgoyne, “you’ve got that very nearly right.”

“Willard White’s a nice fellow,” Barry went on, “except that he’s a little cracked about his Packard.  They give motoring parties, and of course they stop at hotels way up the country for lunch, and the women have got to have veils and special hats and coats, and so on.  Wayne Adams told me it stood him in about thirty dollars every time he went out with the Whites.  Wayne’s got his own car now; his wife kept at him day and night to get it.  But he can’t run it, so it’s in the garage half the time.”

“That’s the worst of motoring,” said the lady with a thoughtful nod, “the people who sell them think they’ve answered you when they say, ’But you don’t run it economically.  If you understood it, it wouldn’t cost you half so much!’ And the alternative is, ’Get a man at seventy-five dollars a month and save repairing and replacing bills.’  Nice for business, Barry, but very much overdone for pleasure, I think.  I myself hate those days spent with five people you hardly know,” she went on, “rushing over beautiful roads that you hardly see, eating too much in strange hotels, and paying too much for it.  I sha’n’t have a car.  But tell me more about the people.  Who are the Adamses?  Didn’t you say Adams?”