Or a homelier simile: remove the cause of chronic
indigestion and the appetite becomes fresh and normal.
Thus Alexina.
CHAPTER V
I
San Francisco, commencing in September, has three or four months of perfect
weather. The cold fogs and winds cease to pay their daily visits, the rainy
season awaits the new year. The skies are a deep and cloudless blue, the
air is warm and soft and alluring, never too hot, although the overcoats of
summer are discarded.
The city lies bathed in golden sunlight or the sharp jeweled light of
stars, when the moon is not blazing like a crystal bonfire. Then Mount
Tamalpais and other mountains across the Bay and behind the city take on
a chiseled outline that, particularly at night, makes them look curiously
new, as if but yesterday heaved from the deep, and Nature too busy to
provide them with a background and the soft blurs of time for centuries to
come. This primeval look of bare California mountains on clear nights has
something sinister and menacing in its aspect as if at any moment they
might once more brood alone over the earth.
II
Alexina returned from abroad early in November and stood one morning
outside her eucalyptus grove, revolving slowly on one heel, schoolgirl
fashion, as she gazed up at the steep densely populated hill that rose from
the street below her own private little hill, and cut off her view of the
hills of Berkeley and the mountains beyond; at the broad crowded valleys
on the south; the range of hills that hid the Pacific Ocean, and included
Mount Calvary with its cross and the symmetrical mass of Twin Peaks; the
bare brown mountains of the north piling above the green sparkling bay with
its wooded and military islands.
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