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CHAPTER 10
That summer passed, then the winter. The wet season began in the last
days of September and continued all through October, November, and
December. At long intervals would come a week of perfect days, the
sky without a cloud, the air motionless, but touched with a certain
nimbleness, a faint effervescence that was exhilarating. Then, without
warning, during a night when a south wind blew, a gray scroll of cloud
would unroll and hang high over the city, and the rain would come
pattering down again, at first in scattered showers, then in an
uninterrupted drizzle.
All day long Trina sat in the bay window of the sitting-room that
commanded a view of a small section of Polk Street. As often as she
raised her head she could see the big market, a confectionery store,
a bell-hanger's shop, and, farther on, above the roofs, the glass
skylights and water tanks of the big public baths. In the nearer
foreground ran the street itself; the cable cars trundled up and down,
thumping heavily over the joints of the rails; market carts by the score
came and went, driven at a great rate by preoccupied young men in their
shirt sleeves, with pencils behind their ears, or by reckless boys in
blood-stained butcher's aprons.
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