Hard-Pan

This fictional book centers on The Mortimer Gault, who lived in the newest and most fashionable part of San Francisco. Two years before they had leased one of the houses that have sprung up, alone or in groups of three or four, throughout that quarter of the city where Pacific Avenue runs out along the edges of the sand hills. Large new houses, shining with paint and bright with window boxes, have settled on the slopes, and now hold the sand down. A layer of earth and a hose have transformed the haggard face of the dunes into gardens which would be a mass of vegetation but for the French gardeners' restraining shears.