The Streets
and
Houses of the City
JANET TERRACE
M ARGARET SYDNEY boarded the streetcar with her nickel ready.
Her beautifully white gloved hand hovered for the hesitation of a
second over the box before her fingers opened and the nickel fell to
the bottom with a dull sound, for which she listened. Hearing it, she
felt immensely satisfied, and in some way vindicated in thinking of all
the thousands of nickels that had gone into that box since she and
Josh had left this city of her birth, childhood and adolescence.
As
she absently found herself a seat she rdlected that from the moment
of their arrival it had been exactly this sort of thing that had charmed
them most-there was an exquisite sense of satisfaction in listening
for sounds that had been going ·on incessantly in the twenty years of
their absence, in looking at houses, at streets and people that had been
there all the while. She wondered why they had stayed away so long '
from San Francisco, because they must have cherished it always
if
their return had so oddly stirred them--she more deeply, she supposed,
for having been born in it, than he, who had lived in it only during
the extraordinary, chaotic and haloed period of their courtship and
early marriage.
She tried now, closing her eyes,
to
settle her impressions of San
Francisco revisited into tangible quantities, into recognition, or de–
light, or simply nostalgia. But the impressions continued to evade
exact definition-it was hard to tell
if
her feeling of completion,
almost of satiety, were from pleasure or pain. The one thing she could
clearly make of it was that the
city
meant far more to her than she
had ever imagined. Seeing it again, she had found in the streets, the
houses, in what seemed to her the almost sacred blue calmness of the
bay, everything she recognized as beauty.
She opened her eyes and looked about, aroused as the car stopped
and took on passengers. Unbelievably one of them was Sally Mason.
Margaret recoiled, shocked, at first from the queer surprise of
seeing Sally a real figure after years of seeing her only in imagination,
but after that more sharply from the instant division in her attitude,
which caused her at once to wish to shout to Sally <\fld to hide her
