Certain people of importance Author:Kathleen Thompson Norris Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE Robert Crabtrees reached San Francisco on a Friday afternoon late in the same month and registered at the Occidental Hotel. They had a large r... more »oom that gave on Montgomery Street, and between it and the hall a totally dark bathroom where a bead of gas burned in a round white globe. Ella Crabtree, Robert's Bostonian wife, was tired from her seven days in the rocking train, and to her the strange city, the blowing, gritty dust of the summer sunset, looked ugly and cheap. But Bob was in good spirits. He breathed his native air again and he liked it. Various men on the train or in the hotel had recognized him, and he was elated and excited at getting home. His business experience in Boston had not been very successful, and he half-hoped now that some chance would prevent the necessity of his returning there, but no one knew that. He could say with perfect truth that he was "representing Se- wall, Scott and Forster," the Boston cotton merchants, for his wife's elderly brother had intimated that a commission business modestly established on the coast might be a good thing for the old cotton firm. Bob was a big man, with an expansive, genial manner, and a hearty, often affected, laugh. His own family had alternated between thinking him a remarkably clever and an amazingly simple person. He had an air of being intimately acquainted with big affairs and important persons, yet he actually held only an underling's position. After the dinner, selected from a list written in a flowing hand with green ink upon a gilt-edged card, Robert and his wife walked about the streets for awhile, and Robert showed Ella the old cable cars on Sutter Street, with their rattling "dummies" attached, and the more modern type of cable cars that filed up Market Street, with yellow lights for...« less