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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Readjustment, by Will Irwin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Readjustment
+
+Author: Will Irwin
+
+Release Date: March 29, 2009 [EBook #28443]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE READJUSTMENT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+READJUSTMENT
+
+BY
+
+WILL IRWIN
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE CITY THAT WAS," ETC.
+
+NEW YORK
+
+B. W. HUEBSCH
+
+1910
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1910, by
+
+B. W. HUEBSCH
+
+PRINTED IN U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+THE READJUSTMENT
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+After luncheon they walked over from the ranch-house--more indeed a
+country villa, what with its ceiled redwood walls, its prints, its
+library, than the working house of a practical farm--and down the
+dusty, sun-beaten lane to the apricot orchard. Picking was on full
+blast, against the all too fast ripening of that early summer.
+
+Judge Tiffany, pattern of a vigorous age, seemed to lean a little upon
+his wife as she walked beside him, her arm tucked confidently into
+his; but it was a leaning of the spirit rather than of the flesh. She,
+younger than he by fifteen years, was a tiny woman, her hair white but
+her waist still slim. She seemed to tinkle and twinkle. Her slight
+hands,--the nail of the little finger was like a grain of
+popcorn--moved with swift, accurate bird-motions. As she chattered of
+the ranch and the picking, her voice, still sweet and controlled,
+came from her lips like the pleasant music of a tea bell. He was
+mainly silent; although he threw in a quiet, controlled answer here
+and there. One could read, in the shadowy solicitude with which she
+regarded him now and then, the relation between that welded old
+couple--she the entertainer, the hoarder of trivial detail from her
+days; he the fond, indulgent listener.
+
+"I think Eleanor must be back from the city," Mrs. Tiffany was saying,
+"I notice smoke from the big chimney; and I suppose she'll be over
+before noon with the sulphur samples. It's amusing and homey in
+her--her habit of flying to her own little nest before she comes to
+us. She'll inspect the house, have dinner ordered, and know every
+blessed detail of the picking before we catch a glimpse of her." Mrs.
+Tiffany smiled sadly, as though this industry were somewhat tragic.
+
+"I wonder how long Eleanor will be contented with such a way of life?"
+put in Judge Tiffany.
+
+"I've worried over that," answered his wife. "Suppose she should
+settle down to it? It isn't as though Eleanor hadn't her chance at
+travel and society and the things a girl of her breeding should have.
+This is all her deliberate choice, and I've done nothing to help her
+choose. Perhaps I should have decided for her. It's curious the guard
+that girl keeps over her deeper feelings. How unlike she is to her
+mother--and yet how like--" Her thought shifted suddenly with the
+direction of her eyes. "Hasn't Olsen overloaded that little team?" she
+said.
+
+The cutting-shed stood midway of their course. Twenty women and girls,
+their lips going as rapidly as their knives, sat on fruit crates at
+long tables, slicing the red-and-gold balls apart, flicking out the
+stones, laying the halves to dry in wooden trays. A wagon had just
+arrived from the orchard. Olsen, the Swedish foreman, was heaving the
+boxes to his Portuguese assistant, who passed them on into the cutting
+shed. Further on stood the bleaching kilns; still further, the bright
+green trees with no artistic irregularities of outline--trees born,
+like a coolie, to bear burdens. Now the branches bent in arcs under
+loads of summer-gilded fruit.
+
+Long step-ladders straddling piles of boxes, beside this row or that,
+showed where picking was going forward. Mrs. Tiffany halted under one
+tree to call pleasantries up to a Portuguese, friend of many a harvest
+before. Judge Tiffany proceeded on down the row, pausing to inspect
+the boxes for any fruit gathered before it was ripe.
+
+The first picker was a Chinese. His box, of course, showed only
+perfection of workmanship. The Judge called up familiarly:
+
+"Hello, Charlie!"
+
+A yellow face grinned through the branches; the leaves rustled as
+though some great bird were foraging, and the answer came back:
+
+"Hello you Judge!" The Judge picked over the next two boxes without
+comment; at the third, he stopped longer.
+
+"Too much greenery, young man!" he cried at length. The branches of
+this tree rustled, and a pair of good, sturdy legs, clad in corduroys,
+appeared on the ladder; then the owner of the legs vaulted from four
+feet high in the air, and hit the ground beside his box.
+
+He was a stalwart boy of perhaps two and twenty, broad, though a bit
+over-heavy, in the shoulders. That approach to over-heaviness
+characterized his face, otherwise clean-cut and fair. His eyes, long,
+brown and ingenuous, rather went to redeem this quality of face. Under
+his wide and flapping sombrero peered the front lock of his straight,
+black hair. Even before he smiled, Judge Tiffany marked him as a
+pleasing youth withal; and when he did smile, eyes and mouth so
+softened with good humor that stern authority went from the face of
+Judge Tiffany. He stood in that embarrassment which an old man feels
+sometimes in the presence of a younger one, struggled for a word to
+cover his slight confusion, and said:
+
+"You are one of the college outfit camped down by the arroyo, aren't
+you?"
+
+"I am," said the youth. "I also picked the fruit too green. I am here
+to take my beating."
+
+Judge Tiffany, who held (he thought) an old-fashioned distaste for
+impudence, smiled back in spite of himself.
+
+"If you don't attend to business in small matters, how can you hope to
+succeed when you go out into life?" he asked with some pomposity. He
+had intended, when he opened his mouth, to say something very
+different. His pomposity, he felt, grew out of his embarrassment; he
+had a dim feeling that he was making himself ridiculous.
+
+"I can't," said the youth with mock meekness; and he smiled again. At
+that moment, while the Judge struggled for a reply and while the youth
+was turning back to the ladder as though to mount it and be done with
+the conversation, two things happened. Up from one side came Mrs.
+Tiffany; and from the other, where ran a road dividing the Tiffany
+orchard from the next, approached a buckboard driven by a lolling
+Portuguese. Beside him sat a girl all in brown, dust-resistant khaki,
+who curtained her face with a parasol. Mrs. Tiffany ran, light as an
+elderly fairy, down the rows.
+
+"Eleanor!" she called.
+
+"Dear, dear Aunt Mattie!" cried the girl. Judge Tiffany, too, was
+hurrying forward to the road. The youth had his hand on the ladder,
+prepared to mount, when the parasol dropped. He stopped short with
+some nervous interruption in his breathing--which might have been a
+catch in his throat--at the sight of her great, grey eyes; stood
+still, watching. Mrs. Tiffany was greeting the girl with the pats and
+caresses of aged fondness. Out of their chatter, presently, this came
+in the girl's voice:
+
+"And I was so excited about getting back that when Antonio left the
+corral gate open I never thought to speak to him. And Ruggles's
+Dynamo--they've let him run away again--just walked in and butted open
+the orchard bars and he's loose now eating the prune trees!"
+
+"Edward, you must go right over!" cried Mrs. Tiffany; and then stopped
+on the thought of an old man trying to subdue a Jersey bull,
+good-natured though that bull might be. The same thought struck Judge
+Tiffany. Antonio, the Portuguese, lolling half-asleep against the
+dashboard, was worse than useless; the nearest visible help was a
+Chinaman, incompetent against horned cattle, and another Portuguese,
+and--
+
+"Let me corral your bull," said the easy, thrilling voice of the boy
+who stood beside the step-ladder. Judge Tiffany turned in reproof, his
+wife in annoyance, the girl in some surprise. The youth was already
+walking toward the buckboard.
+
+"I guess that lets you out, John," he said to the Portuguese.
+
+Something in him, the same quality which had made the Judge smile back
+through his rebuke concerning the green apricots, held them all. The
+Judge spoke first:
+
+"Very well, Mr.--"
+
+"Chester--Bertram Chester," said the youth, throwing his
+self-introduction straight at the girl.
+
+"Mr. Chester is one of the University boys who are picking for us this
+summer," said Judge Tiffany.
+
+"Yes?" replied the girl in a balanced, incurious tone. Her eyes
+followed Mr. Chester, while he took the reins from the deposed Antonio
+and waited for her to mount the buckboard. As she sprang up, after a
+final caution from Mrs. Tiffany, she perceived that he was going to
+"help her in." With a motion both quick and slight, she evaded his
+hand and sprang to the seat unaided.
+
+Mr. Chester slapped the reins, clucked to the horse, and bent his gaze
+down upon the girl. He had seated himself all too close. She crowded
+herself against the iron seat-rail. It annoyed her a little; it
+embarrassed her still more. She was slightly relieved when he made a
+beginning of conversation.
+
+"So you're Judge Tiffany's niece, the girl who runs her ranch herself.
+I've heard heaps about you."
+
+"Yes?" Embarrassment came back with the sound of her own voice. She
+could talk to Judge Tiffany or to any man of Judge Tiffany's age, but
+with her male contemporaries she felt always this same constraint. And
+this young man was looking on her insistently, as though demanding
+answers.
+
+"They say you're one of the smartest ranchers in these parts," he went
+on.
+
+"Do they?" Her tone was even and inexpressive. But Mr. Chester kept
+straight along the path he was treading.
+
+"And that you're also the prettiest girl around Santa Lucia."
+
+"That's very kind of them."
+
+"I haven't seen your ranch, but about the rest of it they're dead
+right."
+
+To this, she made no answer.
+
+"I'm just down for a few weeks," he went on, changing the subject when
+he perceived that he had drawn no reply. "I'm a Senior next year at
+Berkeley. Ever been over to Berkeley?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Ever go to any of the class dances?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Thought you might, being in the city winters. I'm not much on dances
+myself. I'm a barb."
+
+He peered, as though expecting that this last statement would evoke
+some answer. But her eyes were fixed on the little group of
+buildings--a bungalow, a barn and a corral--which had just come in
+sight around a turn of the orchard road. For the first time, she spoke
+with animation.
+
+"There's the house--and there he is, just back of the stable!"
+
+Dynamo, the bull, a black and tan patch amidst the greenery, stood
+reaching with his tongue at an overhanging prune branch, bowed to the
+breaking point with green beads of fruit. As they watched, he sucked
+its tip between his blue lips, pulled at it with a twist of his head;
+the branch cracked and broke. Dynamo, his eyes closed in meditative
+enjoyment, started to absorb it from end to end.
+
+"Oh, dear, he'll ruin it!" she cried. "Do hurry! Hadn't you better
+send for help?"
+
+"I figure I can handle him," said Bertram Chester, bristling at the
+imputation. "Just give me that halter and drive in back of the
+corral, will you?"
+
+"Please don't let him trample any trees!" she called after her
+champion as he vaulted the fence.
+
+Dynamo, seeing the end of his picnic at hand, galloped awkwardly a few
+rods, the branch trailing from his mouth. Then, with the ponderous but
+sudden shift of bull psychology, indignation rose in his bosom. He
+stopped himself so short that his fore-hoofs plowed two long furrows
+in the soft earth; whirled, lifted his muzzle, and bellowed. One
+fore-hoof tore up the dirt and showered it over his back. He dropped
+to his knees and rubbed the ground with his neck in sheer abandonment
+to the joy of his own abandoned wickedness. He rose up in the hollow
+which he had dug, lowered his horns, and glowered at the youth, who
+advanced with a kind of awkward bull-strength of his own.
+
+"Chase yourself!" cried Bertram Chester, flicking the halter. For a
+second, Dynamo's eyelids fluttered; then, unaccountably, his bull
+pride rose up in him. He stopped midway of a bellow; his head went
+down, his tail rose up--and he charged. The girl across the fence
+gave a little scream. The youth, stepping aside with a quickness
+marvelous considering the size of his frame, avoided the charge. As
+Dynamo tore past him, he struck out--a mighty lash--with the halter.
+The bull tore on until he smashed into a prune tree. The green fruit
+flew like water splashing from a stone; and Dynamo checked his course,
+turned again, began to paw and challenge as the preliminary to another
+charge.
+
+"Oh, let him go--please!" cried Eleanor. Whether he heard her or not
+made little difference to the youth. Taking advantage of Dynamo's
+slight hesitation, he sprang in close, caught him by the horn and the
+tender, black nose; and back and forth, across the ruins of the prune
+tree, which went flat at the first rally, they fought and tugged and
+tossed. Through the agonized half-bellows of Dynamo, Eleanor caught a
+slighter sound. Her champion was swearing! Raised a little above her
+fears by the vicarious joy of fight, she took no offence at this; it
+seemed part of the picture.
+
+No one can account for the emotional processes of a bull. Just as
+suddenly as it rose, Dynamo's courage evaporated. Once more was he
+brother to the driven ox. He ceased to plant his fore feet; his bellow
+became a moan; he gave backward; in one mighty toss, he threw off his
+conqueror, turned, and galloped down the orchard with his tail curved
+like a pretzel across his back. Behind him followed the youth, lashing
+him with the halter as long as he could keep it up, pelting him with
+rocks and clods as the retreat gained. So, in a cloud of dust, they
+vanished into the Santa Clara road.
+
+When Bertram Chester came back panting, to return the halter, Antonio
+had arrived and was unhitching the bay mare from the buckboard.
+Eleanor stood by the corral gate, her Panama hat fallen back from her
+brown hair and a little of the excitement left in her grey eyes.
+Bertram approached, grinning; he wore a swagger like that of a little
+boy who has just turned a series of somersaults before the little
+girls. Eleanor noticed this. Faintly--and in spite of the gratitude
+she owed him for turning a neighborly service into a heroic deed--she
+resented it. Also, Dynamo and Mr. Chester, between them, had wholly
+ruined a good prune tree in the prime of bearing.
+
+"Say, we didn't do a thing to that tree," said Bertram Chester, with
+the air of one who deprecates himself that he may leave the road wide
+open for praise.
+
+"It doesn't matter. It--it was very brave of you. Thank you very
+much--are you hurt?"
+
+"Only mussed up a little." He blinked perceptibly at the coolness in
+her tone. Then he leaned back against a fence-post with the settled
+air of one who expects to continue the conversation. She swayed
+slightly away from him.
+
+"Kind of nice place," he said, sweeping his eye over the shingled
+cottage whose rose-bushes were making a brave fight against the dry
+summer dust, over the tiny lawn, over the Lombardy poplars.
+
+"It's nice of you to say so."
+
+Bertram turned his eye upon her again.
+
+"Say," said he, "I don't believe the Judge expects me back right away!
+Anything more I can do around the place?"
+
+Eleanor smiled through her slight resentment.
+
+"I don't think I care to take the responsibility." In that moment,
+the butcher-wagon, making the rounds from farm-house to farm-house,
+appeared quite suddenly at the bend of the road. Maria, wife of
+Antonio and cook for Eleanor's haciendetta, ran out to meet it.
+
+"Oh, Maria--tell Mr. Bowles I want to see him!" cried Eleanor, and
+hurried toward the house. Bertram Chester stood deserted for a moment,
+and then;
+
+"Good bye!" he called after her.
+
+"Good bye and thank you so much!" she answered over her shoulder.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two minutes later, Mr. Bowles, driver of the meat wagon, was saying to
+Eleanor:
+
+"Which was it--rib or loin for Saturday, Miss Gray?"
+
+"Was it?" said Eleanor, absently; and she fell to silence. Maria and
+Mr. Bowles, waiting respectfully for her decision, followed her eyes.
+She was looking at a dust cloud which trailed down the lane. When she
+came out of her revery and beheld them both watching, silent and
+open-mouthed, she flushed violently.
+
+Bertram Chester, swinging between the green rows, was whistling
+blithely:
+
+          "Say coons have you ebber ebber seen ma Angeline?
+          She am de swetes' swetes' coon you ebber seen."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Every Sunday afternoon during the picking season, Mrs. Tiffany served
+tea on the lawn for the half-dozen familiar households on the Santa
+Lucia tract. That was the busy time of all the year, affording no
+leisure for those dinners and whist parties which came in the early
+season, when the country families had just arrived from town, or in
+the late season, when prune picking grew slack. Night finds one weary
+in the country, even when his day has brought only supervision of
+labor. These town-bred folk, living from the soil and still but half
+welded to it, fell unconsciously into farmer habits in this working
+period.
+
+The Goodyears and the Morses, more formal than their neighbors, did
+indeed give a dinner once or twice a summer to this or that visitor
+from San Francisco or San Jose. Otherwise, the colony gathered only at
+this Sunday afternoon tea of Mrs. Tiffany's. Her place lay about
+midway of the colony, her lawn, such as it was--no lawn flourishes
+greatly in that land of dry summers--was the oldest and best kept of
+all; further, they had acquired the habit. Already, these Californians
+were beginning a country life remotely like that of England; a country
+life made gracious by all the simple refinements, from bathtubs to
+books. They had settled, too, into the ways of a clique; small and
+informal as their entertainments were, minor jealousies of leadership
+had developed already.
+
+By a kind of consent never yet made law by any contest, the Goodyears
+were leaders and dictators. He, Raleigh Goodyear, was passably rich;
+his wife was by birth of that old Southern set which dominated the
+society of San Francisco from its very beginning. Until their only
+daughter married into the army and, by her money and connections,
+advanced her husband to a staff position in Washington, Mrs. Goodyear
+had figured among the patrons to those cotillions and assemblies by
+which the elect, under selection of a wine agent, set themselves off
+from the aspiring. Them the colony treated with familiar deference.
+
+Mrs. Tiffany, whose native desire to please and accommodate had grown
+with her kind of matrimony, held social leadership of a different
+kind. Her summer house was the boudoir of this colony, as her town
+house was the centre for quiet and informal entertainment just tinged
+with Bohemia. Hers was the gate at which one stopped for a greeting
+and a chat as one drove past on the road; she was forever running to
+that gate. She knew the troubles of all her neighbors, both the town
+dwellers of her set and the humbler folk who made fruit farming more
+of a business. That rather silent husband of hers--a man getting an
+uncomfortable peace from the end of a turbulent and disappointing life
+which had just escaped great success--told her that she had one great
+fault of the head. She must always make a martyr of herself by bearing
+the burdens of her world.
+
+The Judge and Mrs. Tiffany sat now, in the early afternoon of a summer
+Sunday, under the gigantic live-oak which shadowed their piazza. She
+was crocheting a pink scarf, through which her tiny fingers flew like
+shuttles; he was reading. Out beyond their hacienda, the American
+"hands," fresh-shaved for Sunday, lolled on the ground over a lazy
+game of cards. From the creek bottom further on, came a sound which,
+in the distance, resembled the drumming of cicadas--a Chinese workman
+was lulling his ease with a moon-fiddle. Near at hand stood the tea
+things, all prepared before Molly, the maid, started for her Sunday
+afternoon visit to the camp of the women cutters. Factory girls from
+the city, these cutters, making a vacation of the summer work.
+
+Mrs. Tiffany glanced up from her yarns at the leonine head of her
+husband, bent above "The History of European Morals," opened her mouth
+as though to speak; thought better of it, apparently. Twice she looked
+up like this, her air showing that she was not quite confident of his
+sympathy in that which she meant to bring forward.
+
+"Edward!" she said at length, quite loud. He lowered the book and
+removed his reading glasses, held them poised--a characteristic
+gesture with him. He said no word; between them, a glance was enough.
+
+"You remember the young man who went over with Eleanor to drive away
+the Ruggles bull?"
+
+Judge Tiffany gave assent by a slight inclination of his head.
+
+"I went over to the camp of those University boys yesterday," she went
+on, running loops with incredible speed, "and I don't quite like the
+way they are living there. They associate too much with the
+cutting-women. You know, Edward, that isn't good for boys of their
+age--and they must be nice at bottom or they wouldn't be trying to
+work their way through college--"
+
+She stopped as though to note the effect. The ripple of a smile played
+under Judge Tiffany's beard. She caught at her next words a little
+nervously.
+
+"You know we have a responsibility for the people about the place,
+Edward--I couldn't bear to think we'd let any nice college boy
+degenerate because we employed him--and it is so easy at their age."
+
+"Which means," broke in the Judge, "that you have asked this Mr.
+Chester up here to tea."
+
+"If--if you wish it, Edward."
+
+"I can't very well countermand your invitation and tell him by the
+foreman not to come. But I warn you that this social recognition will
+serve as no excuse if I catch him picking any more green apricots."
+
+Mrs. Tiffany, unturned by this breeze of criticism, ran along on her
+own tack.
+
+"His manners _are_ a little forward, but he has a nice way of
+speaking. I'm sure he is a gentleman, at bottom. You can't expect such
+a young man, who has been obliged to work his way, to have all the
+graces at once. They've brought down their town clothes--I saw them
+last Sunday--so you needn't be afraid of that. I've asked Mr. Heath,
+too."
+
+"Is that by way of another introduction?" asked Judge Tiffany. His
+eyes looked at her severely, but his beard showed that he was smiling
+gently again. Half his joy in a welded marriage lay in his
+appreciation of her humors, as though one should laugh at himself.
+
+"Oh, there's no doubt that _he's_ a gentleman. He is less loud,
+somehow, than Mr. Chester, though he hasn't his charm. It seems there
+is the most wonderful boy friendship between them."
+
+"Where did you get all this insight into the social life of our
+employees?" asked Judge Tiffany; and then, "Mattie, you've been
+exposing yourself to the night air again."
+
+"Over at their camp last evening," said Mrs. Tiffany. "Well, and isn't
+it my business to look after--after that side of the ranch?" she
+added.
+
+The Judge had dropped the book now; his senses were alert to the game
+which never grew old to him--"Mattie-baiting" he had named it.
+
+"Mattie," he said, "with a pretty and marriageable, dowered and maiden
+niece on your hands, a new era is opening in your life of passionate
+self-sacrifice. It used to be orphan children and neglected wives of
+farm hands. Now it is presentable but neglected bachelors. Your
+darling match for Eleanor, I suppose, would be some young soul
+snatched from evil courses, pruned, trimmed, and delivered at the
+altar with 'Made by Mattie Tiffany' branded on his wings. Spare, O
+spare your innocent niece!"
+
+"Edward, I never thought of it in that light!" cried Mrs. Tiffany; and
+she bent herself to furious crocheting. After a time, and when the
+Judge had resumed his book, she looked up and added:
+
+"It might be worse, though, than a young man who had made it all
+himself."
+
+Judge Tiffany burst into laughter. Then, seeing her bend closer over
+her pink yarns, he grew grave, reached for the hand which held the
+needles, and kissed it.
+
+That was her reward of childless matrimony, as the appreciation of her
+humors was his.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+While they sat thus, in one of their comfortable hours, the guests
+were come. The Morses appeared first. He was a pleasant,
+hollow-chested little man; his delicacy of lung gave him his excuse
+for playing gentleman farmer. She, half-Spanish, carried bulk for the
+family and carried it well. The Andalusian showed in her coy yet open
+air, in her small, broad hand and foot, in a languorous liquidity of
+eye. Their son, a well-behaved and pretty youth of twelve, and their
+daughter, two years older, rode behind them on the back seat. The
+daughter bore one of those mosaic names with which the mixed race has
+sprinkled California--Teresa del Vinal Morse. A pretty, delicate
+tea-rose thing, she stood at an age of divided appreciations. In the
+informal society of the Santa Lucia colony, she was listening half the
+time to her elders, taking a shadowy interest in their sayings and
+opinions; for the rest, she was turning on Theodore, that childish
+brother, an illuminated understanding.
+
+The Goodyears arrived with a little flourish. Their trap, which she
+drove herself and which was perhaps a little too English to be useful
+or appropriate on a Californian road, the straight, tailor lines of
+her suit--all displayed that kind of quiet, refined ostentation which,
+very possibly, shrieks as loud to God as the diamond rings on a soiled
+finger. Mrs. Tiffany, who had met the Morses on the lawn, tripped
+clear across the rose-border to meet the Goodyears; did it with entire
+unconsciousness of drawing any distinction. As by right, Mrs. Goodyear
+appropriated the great green arm-chair under the oak tree, from which
+throne she radiated a delicate patronage upon the company.
+
+The others followed by twos and threes. Montgomery Lee, fresh-faced
+English University man, raising prunes on his patrimony of a younger
+son; the Roach girls, plump Californian old maids, and their pleasant
+little Yankee mother; the Ruggleses, a young married couple. Careless
+farmers, Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles; but they had the good nature which is
+the virtue of that defect. This, and the common interest in their
+three plump, mischievous babies, gave them general popularity in the
+colony.
+
+Within five minutes, the company had followed the law of such
+middle-aged groups of familiars, and separated by sexes. The men
+drifted over to the piazza, lit cigars, hoisted their knees, and
+talked, first, of the prune picking, their trouble with help, the
+rather bootless effort of a group in San Jose to form a Growers'
+Association; then of that city where lay their more vital interests.
+
+Goodyear had just been to San Francisco on a flying trip; he brought
+back fresh gossip: The Bohemian Club had the "Jinks" in rehearsal; a
+new-discovered poet had written the book; it was to be (so the Sire
+declared) the greatest in club history.
+
+"As usual," smiled Judge Tiffany.
+
+They were saying about the Pacific Union Club that the Southern
+Pacific had raised its rates to Southern points. One might have sensed
+that shadow which hangs always over commercial California in the
+sombreness which froze the group at this news. From five minutes of
+pessimistic discussion, Goodyear led them by a scattered fire of
+personalities. Billy Darnton was going to give a bull's head breakfast
+at San Jacinto. Al Hemphill was coming to it all the way from New
+York. Charlie Bates had pulled out for the new gold diggings in the
+Mojave desert, rich again in anticipation, although he had to leave
+San Francisco secretly to escape the process servers.
+
+"Tea, gentlemen!" called Mrs. Tiffany, from her nasturtium bower in
+the shadow of the great oak.
+
+"Just when we are getting comfortable," her husband growled
+pleasantly; and he made no move to rise. The women sat at ease about
+the tea-table. Their talk, beginning with the marvelous Ruggles
+babies, had run lightly past clothes and help, and fallen into the
+hands of Mrs. Goodyear. She, too, was full of San Francisco. Apart,
+under the grape arbor, Teresa Morse and her brother were snaring
+lizards--playing like two well-behaved babies miraculously grown
+tall.
+
+"There's Eleanor," suddenly spoke Teresa. At the word, she dropped
+her lizard, started forward; and stopped as she came out into full
+view of the road.
+
+Eleanor, in fresh white, bareheaded under her parasol, was approaching
+between two young men. The slighter of the two men moved a little
+apart; the heavier, in whom Mrs. Tiffany recognized with some
+apprehension the new protege, Mr. Bertram Chester, walked very close
+up. He was peering under the parasol, which Eleanor dropped in his
+direction from time to time without visibly effecting his removal. It
+seemed from his wide gestures, from the smile which became apparent as
+he drew nearer, that he was talking ardently.
+
+In the other man, Mrs. Tiffany recognized that Mr. Heath who had the
+boy friendship with Bertram Chester. He was putting in a word now and
+then, it appeared. When he spoke, Eleanor turned polite attention upon
+him; and then resumed her guarded attitude toward that dynamo buzzing
+at her left. Insensible of the company on the lawn, they passed behind
+the grape arbor which fringed the gate and which hid them temporarily
+from view; and the one-sided conversation became audible.
+
+"It wasn't a _patch_ on fights I've had with 'em. Down home, I used to
+fight steers right along. That's nothing to a nigger who used to work
+for us in Tulare. He'd jump on their backs and reach over and bite
+their noses till they hollered quits. Sure thing he did!" It died out
+as they turned in at the gate and faced the group about the trees.
+
+Mrs. Goodyear made a gesture of an imaginary lorgnette toward her
+high-bridged nose. Mrs. Tiffany gathered herself and ran over to the
+gate. It was Mr. Heath--she noticed as she advanced--who was blushing.
+Bertram Chester stood square on his two feet smiling genially. As for
+Eleanor, she maintained that sweet inscrutability of face which
+became, as years and trouble came on, her great and unappreciated
+personal asset.
+
+Young Chester spoke first:
+
+"I knew Miss Gray was coming down this afternoon--so I laid for her on
+the road--didn't I, Miss Gray?"
+
+"Very nice of you, I'm sure," murmured Mrs. Tiffany, though she bit
+her lip before she spoke--"won't you come over to meet our friends?"
+Eleanor had darted ahead, to the pats of the women and the adoring
+hugs of Teresa Morse.
+
+Mrs. Tiffany saw with relief that her disgraced protege managed his
+end of the introduction very well, although he did make a slight
+advance to shake hands with the critical Mrs. Goodyear. He gave no
+sign to show that he perceived the men over on the piazza. Mr. Heath,
+his Fidus Achates, cast a slight glance in their direction; then,
+seeing Bertram settle himself down in an arm-chair and begin at once
+to address Mrs. Goodyear, he sat down likewise, suffused with an air
+of young embarrassment. Mrs. Ruggles, seated next to him, began with
+visible tact the effort to put him at his ease.
+
+Mr. Chester, as he talked to Mrs. Goodyear, looked always toward
+Eleanor. She, helping Mrs. Tiffany with the tea things, turning a
+caressing word now and then toward Teresa Morse, might not have
+noticed, for all her expression showed.
+
+The men came over for tea, were introduced. Mrs. Tiffany, in her
+foolish anxiety for the manners and appearance of her protege, noted
+that he was at home with men, at least.
+
+Mr. Goodyear, indeed, clutched with his eye at the blue-and-gold
+button in the lapel of Bertram's coat, at the figure of him, and at
+the name.
+
+"You aren't Chester who played tackle on the Berkeley Varsity last
+season?" he asked. An old Harvard oar, Goodyear kept up his interest
+in athletics.
+
+"Tackle and half," said the youth. "Yes, sir."
+
+"Well, well, I remember you in the game!" said Goodyear.
+
+Mrs. Tiffany, now that her protege no longer needed watching, had
+returned to her tea things.
+
+"Eleanor," she called. "Will you run into the house and get that box
+of chocolate wafers that's over the ice chest?"
+
+"Let me carry 'em for you, Miss Gray," put in Chester, breaking
+through a college reminiscence of Goodyear's.
+
+Eleanor never flicked an eyelash as she announced:
+
+"I should be very glad."
+
+Tiffany, glancing over the group, noted with comparative relief that
+none but she, Goodyear, and the young persons involved, had heard this
+passage.
+
+As they moved toward the house, Bertram opened upon Miss Gray at
+once.
+
+"This is the second chance I've had alone at you," he said.
+
+"We are rather conspicuous," she burst out.
+
+"Oh, nobody'll mind. A girl always thinks everybody is looking at her.
+Besides, I wouldn't care if they were. I've wanted to tell you
+something, and I couldn't with Heath trailing us. You've got awfully
+nice eyes."
+
+Eleanor seemed to see neither the necessity nor the convenience of an
+answer.
+
+"But you have!" he persisted. "They're better than pretty. They're
+nice."
+
+Again Eleanor said nothing. It seemed to her that there was nothing to
+say.
+
+"I know why you've got it in for me," he burst out. "You have, you
+know. When I speak to you, you never talk back, and yesterday you
+wouldn't let me stay after I had corralled the bull. It's because I'm
+working for your uncle. It's because I'm making a living, not eating
+what someone else made for me like--" he swept his hand backward
+toward the company on the lawn--"like those people out there."
+
+Stung, for a second, to a visible emotion, Eleanor raised her grey
+eyes and regarded him.
+
+"You are assuming a little, aren't you?" said she.
+
+"Then why can't I come to see you sometime in the evening if that
+isn't so? I don't ask it of many nice girls."
+
+She caught at the delimiting phrase, "nice girls," and glanced up
+again. By this time, they had passed through the living room; and he
+had awkwardly opened the door into the kitchen.
+
+"I haven't known you very long," she said.
+
+"There isn't a lot to know about me," he grumbled. Then his face
+cleared like the sunshine breaking through. "I could teach you to
+savvey the whole works in an evening."
+
+"There are the chocolate wafers up over the ice-chest--that brown tin
+box." He reached up and heaved the package down, putting into that
+simple and easy operation the energy of one lifting a trunk.
+
+Annoyed, and a little amused, Eleanor watched him. All at once, she
+felt a catch in her throat, was aware of a vague, uncomprehended
+fear--fear of him, of her loneliness with him, of something further
+and greater which she could not understand, did not try to understand.
+She wanted air; wanted to get away. When he turned about, she stood
+holding open the kitchen door, her eyes averted.
+
+She felt that he was standing over her; she felt his smile as he
+looked down.
+
+"You needn't be in such a terrible hurry," he said.
+
+"They'll be waiting for us on the lawn," she forced herself to answer.
+It required all her energy to keep her voice clear and firm. Then she
+hurried ahead into the open air. Once in sight of the lawn party, she
+made herself walk beside him, even smile up at him.
+
+"It's just as I said--" he had gone back to his grumbling voice and
+his wholly presumptuous manner--"Either you don't like me, or you're
+sore on me because I'm working for your uncle."
+
+To the great relief of Eleanor, Mrs. Tiffany came out to meet them,
+took the box from Bertram and accompanied them back to the tea table.
+For the rest of the afternoon, Eleanor managed by one device or
+another to save the situation. When, in the shifting of group and
+group, she had no one else for protection, Teresa Morse, following her
+like a dog, ready to come to her side at a glance, played the
+involuntary chaperone.
+
+Judge Tiffany had no word alone with his wife until the sun slanted
+low across the orchard and the company broke up. When he met her
+apart, he said:
+
+"He ought to be a success, that protege of yours!"
+
+"I have been dreadfully mortified!"
+
+"Oh, not a social success, though that may come too, if he ever
+perceives the necessity for it. But a general success. Such simple and
+unturned directness as his ought to win out anywhere. It is more than
+enchanting. It is magnificent. I'm willing to risk discipline on the
+place just to study a specimen so unusual. Mattie, this time I am
+going to assist. I'm going to ask him to supper."
+
+"Edward, are you laughing at me again?"
+
+"For once, my dear, no; not at least on the main line. You'd better
+ask that Mr. Heath, too."
+
+"And Eleanor?"
+
+The Judge looked across to the oak tree, where Eleanor was
+ostentatiously tying up the brown braids of Teresa Morse. Bertram,
+talking athletics with Goodyear, had her under fire of his eyes.
+
+"If any young person was ever capable to make that choice, it is your
+niece Eleanor," he said. "It might afford study. Yes, ask her, too."
+
+Mr. Chester and Mr. Heath were delighted; though Mr. Chester said that
+he had an engagement for the evening. ("What engagement except with
+the cutting-women?" thought Mattie Tiffany.) But Eleanor declined.
+Some of the chickens were sick; she was afraid that it might be the
+pip; she doubted if Antonio or Maria would attend to it; she would sup
+at home. Mrs. Tiffany, anticipating the intention which she saw in
+Bertram's eyes, made a quick draft on her tact and asked:
+
+"Mr. Chester, would you mind helping me in with the chairs?"
+
+Seated at the supper table, Bertram Chester expanded. The Judge took
+him in hand at once; led him on into twenty channels of introspective
+talk. Presently, they were speaking direct to one another, the gulf
+that separates youth from age, employer from employed, bridged by
+interest on one side and supreme confidence on the other. This
+grouping left Mrs. Tiffany free to study Heath. It grew upon her that
+she had overlooked him and his needs through her interest in the more
+obvious Chester. She noticed with approval his finished table manners.
+Mr. Chester, though he understood the proper use of knife and fork and
+napkin, paid slight attention to "passing things"; Heath, on the
+contrary, was alert always, and especially to her needs. "He had a
+careful mother," she thought. Gently, and with a concealed approach,
+she led him on to his family and his worldly circumstances. He spoke
+freely and simply, and with a curious frank assumption that anything
+his people chose to do was right, because they did it. He had come
+down to the University from Tacoma; his father kept a wagon repair
+shop. His people had gone too heavily into the land boom, and lost
+everything.
+
+"I felt that I could work my way through Berkeley or Stanford more
+easily than through an Eastern college," he said simply.
+
+"And then I shouldn't be so far away from home. Mother likes to see me
+at least once a year."
+
+He was going home after the apricot picking was over; he felt that in
+vacation he should earn at least his fare to Washington and back.
+
+"I'm sure she must be a very good mother to deserve that devotion,"
+said Mrs. Tiffany, warming to him.
+
+"She deserves more," he said, a kind of inner glow rising to his
+white-and-pink boyish face. That same glow,--Mrs. Tiffany might have
+noticed this and did not--illuminated him whenever, from across the
+table, Chester's laugh or his energetic crack on a sentence called a
+forced attention. Mr. Heath deferred always to this louder
+personality; kept for him the anxious and eager interest of a mother
+toward her young. Gradually, this interest absorbed both Mr. Heath and
+Mrs. Tiffany. The table talk became a series of monologues by young
+Bertram Chester, Judge Tiffany throwing in just enough replies to spur
+and guide him.
+
+"No, I don't belong to any fraternity," said the confident youth,
+"don't believe in them. They plenty beat me for football captain last
+year too. When I came to college, they didn't want me. After I made
+the team and got prominent, they began to rush me. Then I didn't want
+_them_."
+
+"It might have been easier for Bert if he _had_ joined them," said
+Heath. "They don't like to have their members working at--with their
+hands; they always find them snap jobs if they are poor and
+prominent."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Bertram. "The barbs elected me business
+manager of the _Occident_ last season--I didn't make the team until I
+was a Sophomore, you know--and that more than paid my way. This year
+I've got a billiard hall with Sandy McCusick.
+
+"He used to be a trainer for the track team," explained Bertram. "I
+steer him custom and he runs it. Ought to get me through next year
+over and above. That's one reason I'm picking fruit and resting my
+mind this summer instead of hustling for money in the city."
+
+"And then?" asked the Judge.
+
+"Law, I guess."
+
+"I am an attorney myself."
+
+"I guess I know that!"
+
+"What school have you chosen?"
+
+"None, I guess. I don't want to afford the time. Yes, I know you want
+good preparation, but I'd rather be preparing in an office, making a
+little and keeping my eye open for chances. I may find, before my
+three years are up, that it isn't law I want, but business."
+
+"I'm not a college man myself," said the Judge, "I got my education by
+reading nights on the farm, and pounded out what law I knew in an
+office at Virginia City. One didn't need a great deal of law to
+practice in Comstock days--more nerve and mining sense. But I've
+regretted always that I didn't have a more thorough preparation.
+Still, every man to his own way. This may be best for you."
+
+"That's what I think," said Bertram Chester. "When I got through High
+School in Tulare, Dad said, 'Unless you want to stay on the ranch,
+you'd better foot it for college.' I didn't want to ranch it, and I
+saw that college must be the best place for a start. Dad put up for
+the first year. I might have stretched it out to cover a little of my
+Sophomore year if I'd been careful. I was a pretty fresh Freshman," he
+added.
+
+"And your mother?" asked Mrs. Tiffany. "I suppose she was crazy for
+you to go."
+
+"Yes, I suppose she would have been. She's been dead ten years. How
+hard is it to get into a law office in San Francisco?" he added,
+shifting.
+
+Judge Tiffany met the direct hint with a direct parry.
+
+"We have five thousand attorneys in San Francisco and only five
+hundred of them are making a living."
+
+"Yes, I know it is overcrowded," said Bertram Chester, not a particle
+abashed.
+
+After black coffee on the piazza, the two college boys swung off down
+the lane, Bertram smoking rapidly at one of the Judge's cigars.
+
+"He can be almost anything," said the Judge, meditatively.
+
+"Even a gentleman?" gently inquired Mrs. Tiffany.
+
+"Perhaps that isn't necessary in our Western way of life. Thank God,
+we haven't come yet to the point where the caste of Vere de Vere is
+necessary to us."
+
+"I wish I had it," he went on, a little wistfully.
+
+"Gentility? why Edward, if anyone--"
+
+"Oh no, my dear. I may say that was half the trouble. So many
+considerations came up; so many things I didn't want to do, so many it
+didn't seem right to do. I was forever turning aside to wrestle with
+my feelings on those things, and forever hesitating. Half the time,
+after the opportunity was gone by, I discovered that my scruples had
+been foolish; but I always discovered afterward. I don't believe that
+success lies that way in a new world."
+
+He had risen; and now his wife rose and stood beside him.
+
+"You are forever talking as though you were a failure. I know you're
+not. Everyone knows you're not."
+
+"The parable of the ten talents, Mattie. Not how much we've got, but
+how much interest we've earned on our powers. However, we had that out
+long ago, my dear. Yes, I know. I promised not to talk and think this
+way. But if I'd been like this boy! He'll seize the thing before him.
+No side considerations in his mind!"
+
+"It is a policy," said Mrs. Tiffany in a tone of injured
+partisanship, "that will land him in jail."
+
+"No," said the Judge, "success does not lead towards jails. He'll look
+out for that."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+In that immortal "middle period" of San-Francisco, when the gay mining
+camp was building toward a stable adjustment of society, when the
+wild, the merry, the dissolute and the brave who built the city were
+settling down to found houses and cultivate respectability in face of
+a constantly resurgent past--in those days none who pretended to
+eminence in the city but knew the sisters Sturtevant. Members of that
+aristocracy which dwelt on Rincon Hill, their names and fames quite
+eclipsed those of their quiet, self-effacing parents. Although they
+never called it that, their establishment amounted to a salon. Also,
+they never called their circle Bohemian, yet it was tinged with an
+easy view on the conventionalities, a leaning toward art and the
+things of art, which meant Bohemia in the time when that word was of
+good repute. Spain, perpetual spring, the flare of adventure in the
+blood, the impulse of men who packed Virgil with their bean-bags on
+the Overland journey, conspired already to make San Francisco a city
+of artists. She had developed her two poets, singers whose notes had
+sounded round the world; the painters had followed. The stir of a new
+life in art, a life which was never quite to reach fulfilment, blew in
+the bay air.
+
+Centre for those awakening young painters, those minor poets who
+carried in weaker hands the torches of the two giant pioneers, was the
+house of the Sturtevant sisters, the one a wit, the other a beauty.
+Heaven was not grudging with gifts to these two. Alice, the wit, had
+also a hidden kind of beauty which was not to be taken in on first
+sight, but which, perceived by the painters of that set, made some of
+them swear that she was the real beauty of the two. Matilda, the
+beauty, had if not wit a sprightly feminine fancy. Then, too, her
+gentleness of judgment, her sweetness of intention, and her illogic of
+loyalty, gave her point of view a humorous quality. Her circle,
+confident in her good-nature, was forever leading her on, by this
+device or that, to exhibit what John Stallard, the novelist, called
+her "comedy of charity." O'Ryan, that great, glowing failure whose
+name will outlive the fame of the successful in San Francisco, used to
+play ingenious jokes upon it. O'Ryan was possibly the only man of any
+time who could draw the sting of a practical joke.
+
+They dwelt, twin-regnant over this world of theirs, in sisterly
+harmony. Stallard declared always that a final gift of fate and the
+gods preserved them to harmony: their tastes in men differed. They had
+choice enough, God wot--poets and novelists struggling on the verge of
+fame; attractive, irresponsible, magnetic journalists, destined never
+to arrive anywhere, but following a flowery path along which a woman
+might smile; sons of new-rich millionaires who followed and backed and
+corrupted the artists of that budding Paris which never blossomed; two
+painters, among many, who got both fame and wealth before they were
+done.
+
+In his later years, one asked Tyson the English novelist, connoisseur
+of women if there ever was one, whom he esteemed the prettiest and
+whom the wittiest among the women he had known and studied.
+
+"For wit, Lady Vera Loudon," he said, "and after her, a quite
+remarkable woman I met in San Francisco out on the West Coast of
+America--of all places." Tradition has enlarged this reply to make
+Matilda Sturtevant his prettiest as Alice was his wittiest.
+
+Matilda's fresh beauty of the devil, her full yet delicate beauty of
+the twenties and early thirties, live in the galleries of Europe. The
+painters all had their try at her; she lived in creation which ran the
+line between miniatures and heroic canvases. Lars Wark, perhaps the
+least considered of all her painter friends, is the one that triumphed
+most of all. Who does not know his Launcelot and Enid? The Enid, of a
+beauty so intelligent, so wistful and so good--she is Matilda
+Sturtevant, hardly idealized.
+
+These twin graces married within two years of each other. Of course,
+they chose strangely. Matilda, whose beauty might have graced the head
+of the table in any one of three gaudy mansions on Nob Hill, chose
+Edward C. Tiffany, attorney, politician in a small but honorable way,
+man about town--and much older than she. Alice, following quietly,
+accepted Billy Gray, journalist--a clever reporter with no
+possibilities beyond that; a gentleman, it is true, and a man of
+likeable disposition, but on the whole the least desirable of all her
+followers.
+
+Billy and Alice Gray lived out the three years which were all they
+ever had of matrimony, in a Latin quarter garret, transformed into a
+studio. The intellectual centre of San Francisco shifted to that
+garret; the gay, the witty and the brilliant still followed wherever
+Alice Gray might go. Billy, a type of the journalist in the time when
+journalism meant the careless life, left her a great deal alone after
+the honeymoon. On his side, there was no conscious neglect in this; on
+her side, there was no reproach. It was just their way of living. He
+adored her with a quiet, steady flame of affection which was too fine
+to degenerate into mere uxoriousness. Already, he was a little too
+fond of his liquor--a peccadillo which attracted little attention in
+that age of the careless city. This troubled Alice Gray less than it
+would have troubled her mother. In the periods when she pulled herself
+up, she worried to think how little she did care about it. In fact,
+his remorseful recovery from his debauches had become her occasion for
+pouring out upon him the mother in her. She reveled guiltily in this
+singular sacrament of her singular love.
+
+After three years Alice Gray gave birth to a daughter--and died within
+a fortnight afterward. In all truth, I may say that life, for Billy
+Gray, ended that day. To lose this tenth muse--I can think of nothing
+more complete in tragedy except the loss of her father of Marjorie
+Fleming. And he, like Marjorie Fleming's father, spoke her name no
+more--until near the end. When after twenty years, his own time came,
+Stallard, LeBrun the poet and Lars Wark gathered to pay him their last
+respects. LeBrun came all the way from New Orleans, and Stallard
+delayed his journey to the South Seas. They had drifted away from him,
+such had become his ways and habits; they came back in honor of the
+woman who illuminated their youth. So long and so powerful was the
+influence of her who never wrote a line except in air and memory.
+
+Billy Gray went on living for the sake of his daughter; but he lived
+like a man driven of the furies. He became one of those restless,
+wandering journalists whose virtue to their newspapers is their utter
+abandonment of courage and enterprise, whose defect is their love of
+drink.
+
+Eleanor, they called the baby--Alice had chosen that name "in case it
+is a girl." Mrs. Tiffany, childless herself, played second mother
+during the first three years of Eleanor's healthy and contented little
+life. Perceiving the growth of bad habits in that broken
+brother-in-law, strong and generous enough to face her perceptions,
+she called him back from a desk in Los Angeles, where, gossip said, he
+was drinking himself to death, and gave him over his daughter to keep.
+From that time on, during a succession of removes which took him from
+Vancouver on the north to Los Angeles on the south, Billy Gray had
+establishment after establishment, housekeeper after housekeeper for
+this daughter. Her face and ways, the dim shadowing of her mother's,
+were the only hold on reality which he kept.
+
+She grew up a rather grave little thing, hardly pretty at all until
+she turned fifteen, when she showed signs that the beauty of her aunt,
+if not the wit of her mother, might live again in her. Of wit, it
+seemed, she had little; neither did she show any great talents in her
+irregular schooling. Her longest term at any one school was three
+years with the Franciscan Sisters in Santa Barbara. They, Spanish
+gentlewomen mainly, are the arbiters and conservators of old fashioned
+manners on the West Coast. Of them it is said, as it is said of
+certain sisterhoods in France, that one may know their graduates by
+the way they keep their combs and brushes. In two years Eleanor
+absorbed something of their grave gentility from these Spanish women.
+Little else she got from that education, seeing that she was a
+Protestant and studied neither catechism nor church doctrine. She did,
+indeed, totter once on the brink of Rome--even dared speak to her
+father about it. He accepted the situation so carelessly and gave his
+assent so easily that she was a little hurt. But the next day, he
+quizzed her about the church and its doctrines. Like a good lawyer, he
+slipped in the crucial question of his cross-examination between two
+blind ones.
+
+"All who die outside of the church go to Hell, don't they?" he asked.
+
+"Sister Sulpicia says so."
+
+"Then your grandmother" (Mrs. Sturtevant had just died) "is in Hell?"
+
+He pursued the line no further; he never needed to; and after a time
+the storm of doctrine died down in her. That phase of life left
+another effect on her beside her manners--a mark common enough among
+Protestant women reared in the shadow of the Catholic Church. Outside
+its pale by belief, she clung to a few of its sacramentals for pet
+superstitions, and to a few of its observances for her consolation in
+trouble and her expression in happiness.
+
+She was sixteen, and about to graduate from a Seminary in Oakland,
+when her call came to her. In one moment, the secret of her father's
+long absence became plain; and her whole way of life changed.
+
+Billy Gray had drifted back to the city of his beginnings and
+happiness; was writing hack editorials and paragraphs for the little
+weeklies which so infested San Francisco. She knew that their fortunes
+were low, that only her inheritance, left in trust by her
+grandparents, kept them moving. Also, a dim suspicion which she had
+held of her father for years was taking shape in her mind--too young
+that mind, yet, for any very strong belief in human conduct not
+written in the tables of the law or in the Etiquette Book.
+
+The current which fused these amorphic thoughts was generated in the
+most commonplace manner. By custom, she went to the seminary on Monday
+morning, staying there until Friday evening. It happened that the
+death of a teacher made Friday an unexpected holiday. Returning on
+Thursday afternoon, she found the house locked. She remembered that
+this was "make-up day" at the weekly which took most of her father's
+work; he must be in the office. She hesitated, wondering whether to
+telephone for the key; decided to walk down town, since it was a
+beaming, windless afternoon.
+
+She came about a corner of Montgomery Street, turned in toward the
+office of _The Whale_, and ran into the environs of a gathering city
+crowd. The men were straining over backs and shoulders to see; the
+women were pressing their hands convulsively to their faces with pity
+and disgust.
+
+"What's the answer?" some one called from the fringe.
+
+"A drunk," came a voice from within, "plain drunk." The police arrived
+just then, and cleared a way; through the rift they made, she saw them
+lift--Billy Gray, her father.
+
+In the limpness and horror of this, her first crisis, she did nothing,
+said nothing; only stood there. Presently, she was aware that a
+workman in soiled overalls had joined the policemen.
+
+"Now that's all right," he was saying, "he's only dead to the world,
+making no trouble for nobody. He works for _The Whale_ up above;
+what's the good to pinch him?" "_The Whale_?" asked one of the
+policemen; and hesitated on the word. In quick decision, then, he
+whirled upon the crowd, pushed it back, cleared a space. The other
+policeman and the man in the soiled overalls--he was foreman of _The
+Whale_--picked up Billy Gray, who was turning and mumbling feebly, and
+started to carry him upstairs. A sudden impulse of her limbs, an
+instinct independent of her will, drew her toward them. The policeman,
+clearing away the crowd, laid hand upon her.
+
+"You'll have to get back little girl!" he said.
+
+She looked him in the eye; the sudden abandonment to her shame seemed
+to lift and to exalt her; afterward, shuddering over that day, she
+still remembered a certain perverse pleasure in this moment. And she
+spoke loud, so loud that all the crowd might hear.
+
+"He is my father!"
+
+The policeman gave way; she hurried up the stairs. The bearers of
+Billy Gray were resting on the top of the first flight. They had
+braced him up against the banisters and were trying to rub sense back
+into him. She addressed herself straight to the foreman.
+
+"Does this happen often?" she asked.
+
+A good natured and communicative person, he was also enough touched by
+his importance as Good Samaritan to answer the question of a stray
+little girl.
+
+"Lord yes!" he replied. "Every pay day nowadays. Used to be the
+brightest man in the business, too."
+
+Then as she stood there, blown by all the strong cross-winds of the
+world, Marshall the editor, who knew Eleanor, came hurrying down the
+stairs. He saw that wreckage, grown familiar now to them all, saw the
+girl standing white of face beside the balustrade; the situation came
+over him at once. He opened the door, drew in both the intoxicated
+Billy Gray and his daughter. Half an hour later, when Billy could walk
+a little--it was a dead, nerveless intoxication with him
+nowadays--Eleanor and the foreman took him home in a cab.
+
+In that long day and night, Eleanor strung together a thousand
+half-forgotten incidents, neglects and irregularities of life, and
+perceived the truth which her whole world had been in conspiracy to
+keep from her. Out of the cross-blowing impulses of an immaturity
+which was still half childhood--self pity, shame, heroic pride in her
+own tragedy, passionate hatreds of a world which harbors such
+things--she came to a resolve in whose very completeness she was happy
+for a time. When, before breakfast, she burst into Mattie Tiffany's
+boudoir, she had a saintly radiance in her face. The elder woman,
+advised by the first words that Eleanor knew, took the little, cold
+body into bed with her, petted her back to something like calm. Storm
+followed the calm; Eleanor went all to pieces in a burst of passionate
+crying.
+
+After she had recovered a little, her purpose came out of her.
+Considering her years, she said it all quite simply and
+undramatically. It was her business to be with her father. Her mother
+would have wished it so. She was going to leave school. That was her
+work.
+
+Mattie Tiffany, with her passion for picturesque philanthropies, knew
+right well that she had neglected somewhat the plain, unpicturesque
+philanthropy which lay close to her hand. She had neither the heart
+nor the conscience to deny Eleanor this sacrifice. In that hour, there
+grew up between the childless aunt and the motherless niece an
+understanding which those three years of first infancy, when Eleanor
+had lain on her breast like a daughter, had never brought at all.
+
+In three months more, during which time Billy Gray reformed, lapsed,
+reformed, lapsed again, the wiser head of Judge Tiffany found the way.
+The Sturtevant estate, nearly fifty thousand dollars in all, lay in
+his hands as trustee. Upon Eleanor's majority, it was to be divided,
+one third accruing to her, the surviving grandchild, and two-thirds to
+Mattie Tiffany.
+
+Of late, Judge Tiffany had been turning his mind toward the Santa
+Clara Valley fruit farms, and especially toward the Santa Lucia tract.
+He had made the struggle with his own world and lost; that is another
+story. At sixty-eight, life held little for him except an easy descent
+into the grave after a career in which he had played only too little.
+That leisurely style of farming, which would permit him to keep an
+eye on his dwindling law practice, attracted him. And nothing, it
+seemed to him, would better further the intention, now awakened in all
+of them, to do something for Billy Gray. He bought, therefore, two
+tracts, already planted and bearing in diversified fruits; one of
+forty acres, with a little cottage home, for Eleanor; the other of
+eighty acres, with a large bungalow, for himself.
+
+So far as his intentions toward Billy Gray went, Judge Tiffany made
+this venture with little hope. Billy Gray had tried the Keeley Cure
+twice. After each course of treatment, he had "beaten it," although he
+must gargle whisky, through a deadly sickness, in order to get back
+into the habit again. His was that variety of drunkenness which is not
+only an unnatural thirst, but also a mania to forget. There on the
+Santa Lucia tract, Billy Gray, sure of a living, might tilt at
+happiness and success with that independent writing which is the
+chimera of all newspaper men until the end of their days; and Eleanor
+might help him make the fight.
+
+The next four years--they were a monotony of variety. For her broken,
+incompetent father, Eleanor learned the art and practice of growing
+apricots and prunes. Lady of her small manor, she made a business of
+it; got it to pay after the second year. Billy Gray never reformed; no
+one but Eleanor ever expected that he would. He smuggled whisky in; he
+stole away to get it; once he led the Judge and Eleanor a chase
+through his old haunts in San Francisco until they found him, broken
+all to pieces, in the county hospital.
+
+That incident--it appeared that he had been beaten by a squad of
+drunken soldiers from the Presidio--was the breaking strain. His
+constitution gone, his mind and body weakened. For twenty years, no
+one had ever heard him speak the name of that Saxon Alice whose death
+was the death of his soul. Now, he began suddenly to babble to his
+daughter of her mother. In his last delirium, he called her "Alice."
+
+When he was dead and buried, Eleanor went on for a year through her
+accustomed routine of the ranch, letting life flow in again. Tired at
+twenty-two, she overstated the feeling to herself after the manner of
+youth, and thought that heart and sense and feeling were dead in her.
+
+In all the years of passage from girlhood to womanhood, she had lived
+alone with that dipsomaniac, seeing only such society as frequented
+her aunt's lawn, and little of that. Books, and such training in life
+as they give, she had known; but she had never known a flirtation, a
+follower or a lover. On the day when Bertram Chester went with her to
+tame the bull, she was as one who steps from the door of a convent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+As she left the Tiffany gate and emerged into the main road between
+Santa Clara and Los Gatos, Eleanor raised her serviceable khaki-brown
+parasol. She was walking directly toward the setting sun, which poured
+into her eyes; yet she dropped the sunshade behind her head as though
+to shield herself against an approach from the rear. No one followed;
+she had walked to the next fence corner before she assured herself of
+that, dared to shift that feminine buckler against the eye of the sun,
+to slacken her pace, and to muse on an afternoon whose events, so
+quiet, so undramatic, and yet so profoundly significant, buzzed still
+in her head. As she thought on them, other things came into her mind
+as momentous and worthy of attention before the jump of the great
+event--that moment alone with Bertram Chester, that panic of
+unaccountable fear. Slow to anger as much by a native and hidden
+sweetness as by that surface control which puzzled her demonstrative
+Aunt Matilda, she surprised her cheeks burning and her blood beating
+in her throat.
+
+With this physical agitation came an army of disagreeable and
+disturbing thoughts. At first they were only recollections of
+irritations past; the tiny maladjustments of her life; things by which
+she owed vengeance of slight wrongs. They came together at length,
+into one great, sore grievance--the forwardness, the utter, mortifying
+impudence, of Mr. Chester. It was long before she admitted this as a
+cause of irritation; once admitted, it overshadowed all her other
+complaints against life.
+
+Timidly, she approached stage by stage that scene on the lawn, that
+unaccountable moment in the kitchen. Again she saw his great shoulders
+heave with unnecessary strength at the ridiculous cracker box; again
+she caught the sense of confinement with a machine of crushing
+strength and power. It seemed to her that her retina still danced with
+the impression of him as he turned to face her, as he flashed upon her
+like a drawn weapon. She found herself looking down at the dusty road;
+suddenly she grew so sick and faint that the breath deserted her body
+and she had to lean against the gate post for support. The touch of
+it against her body revived her with a start, and brought to her mind
+the extent and folly of her own imaginings. She pulled herself
+together and dropped her parasol to shield her face from Maria, who
+was hurrying over from the kitchen garden.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Life flowed in immediately. A hundred details of a household, of a
+fruit farm in the picking season, awaited her attention. Her orchard
+and the Tiffany orchard were conducted together on a kind of a loose
+co-operative system devised by the Judge to give her the greatest
+amount of freedom with just as much responsibility as would be good
+for her. Foreseeing that Alice Sturtevant's daughter would never live
+on a farm indefinitely, that marriage or her own kind would claim her
+in the end, he arranged everything so that her oversight might pass on
+short notice to Olsen or to himself. In this harvest season, for
+example, he secured for both farms the cutters and pickers--the
+hardest problem for the Californian farmer. Also, the fruit went to
+his own sheds and yards for cutting and drying. He was among the
+sturdy minority who stood out against the co-operative driers which
+had absorbed most of the fruit crop in the Santa Clara Valley. The
+detail work about her place--such as setting out the fruit boxes,
+selecting the moment when apricots or pears were ripe for the picking,
+seeing that the trees, her permanent investment, were not injured by
+wagon or picker, keeping her own accounts in balance with those of
+Judge Tiffany--these and a hundred other little things she did herself
+and did them well. Especially was the up-keep of the orchard her
+special care; and this she managed with such native mother-sense that
+one learned in trees might have told just when he crossed the unfenced
+line from the Gray orchard to the Tiffany orchard.
+
+To-night, Olsen was waiting to know whether she thought that the ten
+rows of Moor Parks were ready for picking; he had just finished the
+first crop of the Judge's Royals and a small gang would be without
+pressing work on Monday morning. So they walked over the orchard
+together, pressing a golden ball here and there, and decided that the
+fruit was ripe and ready. Eleanor summoned Antonio for directions
+about boxes and ladders. The hen-house had to be inspected, for
+Eleanor was fumigating against the pip, brought into the Santa Lucia
+by an importation of fancy Eastern chickens. To-morrow's menu of the
+housekeeper was to be looked after. The things kept her busy until her
+solitary Sunday evening supper.
+
+Eleanor had dined alone so much that she had quite recovered from any
+self-pity on that score. Like the daughter of convent manners that she
+was, she kept up her self-respect by a little ceremony at this meal.
+She dressed for it usually; at least she put on fresh ribbons and
+flowers, gave a touch here and there to the table, held Maria to the
+refinements of service.
+
+However, as she opened her napkin that evening the rush and emotional
+strain of the day brought a certain flash of introspection. It came
+first when she lifted her eyes and caught sight of herself in the
+mirror--dewy eyed, fresh, a pink rose in her hair, a pink ribbon at
+her throat. What was she, so young, so feminine, doing there, supping
+alone in state? She remembered the invitation of Lars Wark in Munich;
+he and his wife, living the life artistic away over there, had sent to
+ask her that she visit them and share their winter in the studio or
+their summer on the coast of Brittany. Why, in the face of that
+alluring invitation, did she suffer her soul to keep her in such
+prisons as this? She could afford it; there was no question of money.
+According to the books she had read, that solitary state belonged to
+old, disappointed bachelors, old maids, faded people generally. Here
+she sat, a picture unseen, playing at age--and she less than
+twenty-two. There was a kind of delicate incongruity about it all. And
+watching her own grey eyes, as they faced her in the mirror, she half
+comprehended why she continued to live so, even after her father died
+and took away the reason for her old solitude. She had been under the
+hypnotic suggestion of an event, an impression. That moment on
+Montgomery street, when she found her father lying drunk, when tragedy
+and responsibility came together--that moment had stretched itself out
+to six years. She had lived by it; was living by it now.
+
+In some unaccountable fashion, that picture would intertwine itself
+with the impression, so new and vivid, which she had received that
+afternoon. Momentarily, both united to produce one emotion--profound
+disgust and dislike for the coarseness, the brutality, of male
+humanity, which had laid her father out on the pavement for the sport
+of a mob, which had made this perturbing young man trample on all
+considerations and delicacies.
+
+"You need not mind about dessert, Maria," she called out suddenly. She
+rose, hurried out of doors, tore into the inspection of fruit crates
+for to-morrow's picking.
+
+Night, falling with little twilight, as always in those climes, found
+her still ranging the house and barnyard, the rose incongruously in
+her hair, the ribbon at her throat. When it was too dark to find
+employment out of doors, she hurried back to the house, tried to read.
+But a sense of confinement drove her forth. She started out toward the
+road, stopped by the hedge gate, sat down finally on a bench under her
+grape arbor. The leaves and the bunches of swelling fruit hid her from
+sight of the highway, overshadowed at that point by a great bay tree.
+
+A confusion of voices, masculine and feminine, sounded in the
+distance. She caught a shrill, rowdy laugh. "The cutting-women and
+their men," she thought dimly. That social phenomenon of the picking
+season, grown accustomed by six years of passing summers and winters,
+drew no special attention from her. But the noise continued; it became
+plain that these reveling laborers were making in her direction.
+Doubtless, they came from the women's camp at Judge Tiffany's. The
+night was bringing her peace and sleep of the soul after a disturbing
+day; alone, that raucous noise marred the calm.
+
+She peered idly through the leaves. A half a dozen women, their white
+dresses making them visible in the dusk, a few men whose forms loomed
+indistinctly against the edge of the sky, noised past her and were
+gone down the road. One couple, she perceived, lingered behind. They
+had reached the shade of the bay tree, were so close that she might
+have reached out and touched them, before she realized the situation.
+She was about to call out, to cough, when the man spoke.
+
+"No, I won't hurt you," he said, "I'm as gentle a little kisser as you
+ever saw." The voice was that of Bert Chester.
+
+"Aw, you're too fresh," came the voice of the girl. But as they drew
+into deeper shadow, she was not pulling away from him.
+
+"Fresh as a daisy!" said the voice of Bertram Chester. Followed a
+struggle, a faint "stop, stop!" in the voice of the girl, the sound of
+gross and heavy kissing. In a moment, the white form of the girl broke
+down the road, the greater, darker form of the man lumbering after. He
+caught her, held her for a longer time and a lesser struggle. She came
+out of this one laughing, and down the road they went, his arm a black
+shadow about her waist.
+
+Eleanor's deeper and higher self--the self that lay like a filmy,
+impalpable wrapper about her conscious mind, so that at times she
+appeared to herself as two persons--that consciousness stood aloof in
+expectation of disgust, revulsion, horror. It came as a confused
+surprise that she felt nothing of the kind. A cloying sweetness, a
+sensation purely physical, as though a syrup had been poured into all
+the channels of her nerves, began in her throat, rushed through body
+and limbs. The sweet tide surged backward, beat in a wave of faintness
+upon her heart. Shame, like air into a vacuum, followed with a rush.
+She sank to the ground, clinging to the bench.
+
+When she had so far mastered herself that she could feel her own
+senses, she was praying aloud--praying in the rite which held her
+emotions while it failed with her reason.
+
+"Ave Maria Sanctissima!" she was saying over and over again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+"Match you to see whether it's good, old fifteen cent feed at the
+Marseillaise or a four bit bust at the Nevada," said Bertram Chester.
+
+"I'll take you," responded Mark Heath, flipping a silver dollar as he
+spoke. "Heads the Nevada; tails the croutons and Dago red."
+
+"Tails it is--aw, let's make it the Nevada to show there's nothing in
+luck."
+
+"You quitter!"
+
+"All right; but I hate to look cabbage soup in the face," grumbled
+Bertram. He resumed, then, his languid occupation which this parley
+had interrupted, and continued to review, from an angle of Moe's cigar
+stand, the passing matinee parade.
+
+The time was late afternoon of a fog-scented October day. Through the
+wet air, street lamps and electric signs had begun to twinkle. Under
+the cross-light of retreating day and incandescent globes, the parade
+of women, all in bright-colored silks and gauds, moved solid,
+unbroken. Opera bags marked off those who had really attended the
+matinees; but only one in five wore this badge of sincerity. The rest
+had dressed and painted and gone abroad to display themselves just
+because it was the fashion in their circles so to dress and paint and
+display. Women of Greek perfection in body and feature, free-stepping
+Western women who met the gaze of men directly and fearlessly, their
+costumes ran through all the exaggerations of Parisian mode and tint.
+Toilettes whose brilliancy would cause heads to turn and necks to
+crane on the streets of an Eastern city, drew here no tribute of
+comment. It had gone on all the afternoon. From the Columbia Theatre
+corner, which formed one boundary of "the line," to the Sutler Street
+corner of Kearney, five blocks away, certain of these peacocks had
+been strutting back and forth since two o'clock. The men who
+corresponded in the social organization to these paraders of vanity
+lined the sidewalks or lolled in the open-air cigar stands, as did
+these two young adventurers in life--Bertram Chester, now a year and a
+half out of college, and Mark Heath, cub reporter on the _Herald_.
+
+When the homefarers from office and factory had begun to tarnish the
+brilliance of this show, when the women had begun to scatter--this one
+to dinner with her man, that one back to the hall-room supper by whose
+economies she saved for her Saturday afternoon vanities--Bertram and
+Mark drifted with the current up Kearney street toward the Hotel
+Marseillaise. In their blood, a little whipped already by the two
+cocktails which they had felt able to afford even while they debated
+over the price of dinner, ran all the sparkling currents of youth.
+They drew on past Sutler Street to Adventurer's Lane, the dingy
+section of that street wherein walked the treasure-farers of all the
+seven seas; and as they walked, Bertram began to speak of the things
+which lay close to his heart.
+
+"I guess I'll chuck the law," he said. "Maybe I'll stay with Judge
+Tiffany a year or so longer--until I get admitted anyway. A bar
+admission might count if I wanted to go into politics."
+
+"Politics is a pretty poor kind of business," responded Mark Heath.
+Old enough in journalism to have recovered somewhat from his first
+enchantment with the rush of life, he was only just beginning to
+acquire the cynical pose.
+
+"Hell, it's all according to how you play it," said Bertram. "When you
+get to be Lincoln, nobody calls it poor business. Do they think any
+the worse of my old man because he played politics to be sheriff of
+Tulare? If I should go into the game down there, his pull would help
+me a lot. But it's me for this." His sweeping gesture took in the
+whole city.
+
+He had missed Mark's point. The latter felt within him a little recoil
+from that loyalty for his greater, more ready, more popular friend,
+which had carried him, a blind slave, through college, and which had
+helped him make him settle in San Francisco instead of Tacoma. Through
+his four years at the University, Mark had shared his crusts with
+Bertram Chester, yelled for him from the bleachers, played his fag at
+class elections. Now Mark was out in the world, practising the
+profession of lost illusions; and a new vision had been growing within
+him for many days. He turned a grave face toward his chum, and his
+lips opened on the impulse of a criticism. But he thought better of
+it. His mouth closed without sound.
+
+"The real chances for a lawyer, though, are in business," Bertram
+went on. "Judge Tiffany never grabbed half his chances. Attwood in the
+office, says so."
+
+"He surely didn't keep out of politics, that Judge," said Mark,
+remembering the turns of fate which had almost--and ever not
+quite--made the old Judge a congressman, a mayor, and a Justice of the
+California State Supreme Court.
+
+"Oh, he had no call to be in politics. He hasn't the sand. Attwood
+says so. And he stuck at his desk and let his business chances go by.
+Myself, I'm keeping my lamps open. Just because the Judge doesn't
+watch his chances, that office is a great place to pick things up.
+Look at those tidewater cases of ours over in Richmond. I know, from
+the inside, that we're going to lose our case, and lots will go
+whooping up. I've written to Bob for a thousand dollars to invest.
+I'll double that in a year and have my first thousand ahead. Say, why
+don't you try something in business instead of sticking to newspapers?
+Let's go in together. Reporting is a rotten kind of business."
+
+"Oh, I don't know, I like it. I think I'll stay with it for a while."
+Again Mark had put back the thought of his heart. Like so many of the
+loyal and devoted, he could hardly bring himself to speak of his own
+deeper motives and ambitions. Least of all could he reveal them in
+this moment of disillusion. He had never told Bertram about the
+four-act comedy hidden in the writing desk of their common room, to be
+mulled over during the mornings of his leisure. "I think I'll stay
+with it for a while, anyway," he added simply.
+
+They had turned out of Kearney Street and were mounting the hill-rise
+toward the Hotel Marseillaise. These fringes and environments of
+Chinatown had been residences for the newly affluent in the days when
+the Poodle Dog flourished and flaunted in the hull of a wreck, in the
+days when that Chinatown site was Rialto and Market-place for the
+overgrown mining camp. The wall moss which blew in with the trade
+winds, and the semi-tropic growth of old ivies and rose-bushes, had
+given to these houses the seasoning of two centuries. Unpretentious
+hovels beside the structures of stone turrets and mill-work fronts by
+which later millionaires shamed California Street and Van Ness Avenue,
+they had the simple dignity of a mission, a colonial farm-house, or
+any other structure wherein love of craft has supplanted scanty
+materials. Innumerable additions of sheds and boxes, the increment of
+their fallen social condition, broke their severe lines. A massive
+door, a carriage entrance, the remains of a balcony faced to catch
+wind and air of the great bay, recalled what they had been; as though
+a washerwoman should wear on her tattered waist some jewel of a wealth
+long past.
+
+The Hotel Marseillaise occupied one of these houses. Where it stood,
+the hill rose steep. One might enter a narrow alley, skirt a board
+fence, dodge into a box hall, seasoned with dinners long past, and
+mount by a steep staircase to the dining room; or he might enter that
+dining room directly from the street, such was the slope of the hill.
+A row of benches parked the front door. On the fine, out-of-doors
+evenings which came too seldom in the City of Fogs, French waiters out
+of work, French deserters from merchantmen in the harbor below, French
+cabmen waiting for night and fares, lolled on these benches while they
+smoked their black cigarettes and chattered in their heavy, peasant
+accent.
+
+Within, Madame Loisel ruled with her cash register at the cigar
+counter. She, bursting with sweet inner fatness like a California
+nectarine, kept in her middle age the everlasting charm and chic of
+the Frenchwoman. This Madame Loisel was a dual personality. She of the
+grave mouth, the considering eye, the business manner, who rung up
+dinner fees on the cash register and bargained with the Chinamen for
+vegetables at the back door, seemed hardly even sister to the Madame
+Loisel of Saturday afternoon on "the line" or Sunday morning at the
+French Church. By what process man may not imagine, this second Madame
+Loisel took six inches from her girth, fifty pounds from her weight,
+fifteen years from her age. Her step was like a dancer's; her figure
+was no more than comfortably plump; her Sunday complexion brought the
+best out of her alluring eyes and her black, ungrizzled hair; her
+hands, in their perfect gloves, bore no resemblance to the hands which
+had scraped pots for Louis Loisel in the time before he could flaunt
+the luxury of a cashier.
+
+In Madame Loisel's background lay the ramblings of a house built for
+comfort and large hospitalities. Gone were the folding doors, bare
+the niches, empty the window-seats. The old drawing-rooms, music-room,
+dining-room, had become one apartment of a sanded floor and many long
+tables. Through this background of his wife moved Louis Loisel,
+grizzled, fat and gay; never too busy at his serving to exchange
+flamboyant banter with a patron.
+
+Hither the peasant French of San Francisco, menials most of them, came
+for luncheons and dinners of thick, heavy vegetable soup, coarse fish,
+boiled joint, third-class fruit and home-made claret, vinted by Louis
+himself in a hand press during those September days when the Latin
+quarter ran purple--and all for fifteen cents! Thither, too, came
+young apprentices of the professions, working at wages to shame a
+laborer, who had learned how much more one got for his money at
+Louis's than at the white-tiled American places further down town. It
+stood for ten years, this Hotel Marseillaise, the hope of the
+impecunious. How many careers did it preserve, how many old failures
+from the wreckage of Kearney Street did it console!
+
+Madame Loisel stood at her cash register as the two young men entered.
+A fresh waist, a ribbon at her throat, a slimness of her waist and an
+artificial freshness in her complexion showed that she had been
+parading that afternoon.
+
+"Bonsoir Madame--la la la-la-la!" called Bertram.
+
+Her face blossomed with coquetry, her teeth gleamed, and:
+
+"Bonsoir--diable!" she smiled back at him. Mark Heath had greeted her
+more soberly. Her eyes followed Chester's big, square frame as he
+moved with lumbering grace to a corner table.
+
+There he sat at the beginning of his career, such as it was, this
+Bertram Chester--a completed piece of work, fresh, unused, from the
+mills of the gods. His strong frame was beginning to fill out, what
+with the abandonment of training for a year. He was a pretty figure of
+a man in his clothes; and those clothes were so woven and cut as to be
+in contrast with his surroundings. A tailor of San Francisco, building
+toward fashionable patronage, had made him suits free during his last
+year in college. Varsity man and public character about the campus,
+Chester paid him back in advertising of mouth. Guided by that
+instinct of vanity and personal display which runs in those who have
+to do with the cattle range, he had learned to dress well before he
+was really sure-mouthed in English grammar.
+
+His face, still, as when we first saw him, a little over-heavy, had
+lightened with the growth of spirit within him. This increase of
+spirit and expression manifested itself in his rolling and merry eye,
+which travelled over all humanity in his path with an air of
+possession, in the mobility of his rather thick-lipped mouth. For the
+rest, the face was all solidity and strength. His neck rose big and
+straight from his collar, a sign of the power which infused the figure
+below; his square chin, in repose, set itself at a most aggressive
+angle; his nose was low-bridged and straight and solid. From any
+company which he frequented, an attraction deeper than his obviously
+regular and animal beauty brought him notice and attention.
+
+The son of Louis, a small, cheerful imitation of his father, slammed a
+bowl of cabbage soup down before them. Bertram, sighing his young,
+ravenous satisfaction, sank the ladle deep and stopped, his hand
+poised, his eyes fixed. Mark followed the direction of his glance.
+Louis Loisel, wearing his best air of formal politeness, was bowing a
+party of women to a table by the door.
+
+"Slummers!" said Mark under his breath. A habitue of the place, he
+had already developed a resentment of outsiders.
+
+Louis pulled out chairs, wiped the table mightily; the French cabmen,
+the Barbary Coast flotsam and jetsam, gazed over their soup-spoons in
+silent, furtive interest.
+
+"It's her!" said Bertram, lapsing into his native speech. Heath
+flashed a glance of recognition at the same moment.
+
+"Miss Gray--sure--Mrs. Tiffany's niece. I thought she was in
+Europe--didn't she start a week or two after we left the ranch?"
+
+"Oh, I knew she was coming back. Mrs. Tiffany told me. The Mrs. Boss
+isn't so sweet on me as she used to be, but I see her in the office
+now and then."
+
+Bertram resumed his ladling. Both watched furtively. It was a balanced
+party--three men and three women. Among the men, Mark Heath recognized
+him of the pointed beard as Masters, the landscape painter. The
+little, brown woman who sat with her back to them must be his wife.
+The other girl, a golden, full-blown Californian thing--her, too, they
+marked and noted with their eyes.
+
+Recognition of a sort had come meanwhile from the party at the guest
+table. Miss Waddington, the full-blown golden girl, had seated herself
+and cooed an appreciative word or two about the quaintness and
+difference of the Marseillaise, when her eyes clutched at the two
+young men in the corner, whose dress made them stand out so queerly
+among the lost and soiled. As Bertram looked up with his glance of
+recognition, her eyes caught his. She glanced down at her plate.
+
+"Eleanor," she said, "is that a flirtation starting, or do any of us
+know the two men in the corner--there under that beer sign."
+
+Eleanor looked. Kate Waddington, her indirect gaze still on that
+corner table, saw the dark young man smile and bow effusively. She
+slipped a sidling glance at Eleanor Gray. Something curious, an intent
+look which seemed drawn to conceal a tumult within, had filmed itself
+over Eleanor's grey eyes. But she spoke steadily.
+
+"Why, yes. I have met them both. They used to do summer work on the
+ranch when they were in college. I believe that the darker one--Mr.
+Chester--is in Uncle Edward's law office now. I haven't seen either of
+them since I went abroad."
+
+"I should say that this Mr. Chester fancied you, from his
+expression."
+
+"I suppose that he fancies every girl that he sees--from his
+expression."
+
+Kate Waddington caught the shade of irritation, uncommon with Eleanor,
+and noted it in memory. Mrs. Masters, an eager little woman who
+grasped at everything about her like a child, broke in:
+
+"If you know them, and they're really frequenters of the place, it
+would be fun to ask them over. Sydney used to dine here a great deal
+when he was young and poor, and he has _such_ stories of the people he
+used to know then!"
+
+Eleanor hesitated. Kate looked again toward Bertram, who was talking
+rapidly across his soup to Mark Heath, and:
+
+"Do!" she murmured.
+
+In that instant, Bertram himself cast the die. This had been the
+debate across the soup:
+
+"I'm going over to speak to her," said Bertram.
+
+"I shouldn't butt in," said Mark. "It's a balanced party."
+
+"Oh, I shan't try to stay--coming along?" He did not wait to see
+whether or not Mark was following.
+
+Miss Gray greeted him more cordially, altogether more sweetly, than
+she had ever done in their meetings on the ranch, and passed him about
+the circle for introductions. Noticing, then, that Mark had not
+followed, Bertram turned and beckoned with impatience. Mark crossed
+the room in some embarrassment.
+
+"Is this your first visit to the Hotel Marseillaise?" asked Mrs.
+Masters. Mark hesitated; but Bertram laughed and beamed down on her
+from his brown eyes.
+
+"Only about my two hundred and first," he said. "Mr. Heath and I dine
+here every night we haven't the price to dine anywhere else."
+
+Masters, with that ready tact which he needed in order to live with
+Mrs. Masters, rushed into the breach.
+
+"And I should call it about my four hundred and first," he said. "It's
+back to the old scenes for the night. I haven't tasted real cabbage
+soup since the last time--it has been a canned imitation. For
+goodness' sake join us and tell us the news!"
+
+"Do!" said Miss Waddington with animation, and "Please," said those
+two escorts who do not figure in this story. Eleanor said nothing, but
+her expression was an invitation.
+
+"Sure!" responded Bertram.
+
+The Hotel Marseillaise had familiar customs of its own. For one thing,
+guests bothered the waiters as little as possible. Masters smiled when
+the two unconscious youths went back to their table, picked up the big
+soup tureen, their knives and forks, their plates, and transported
+them to the larger table.
+
+They were dragging the lees of a rather squalid Bohemia, these two
+boys; a Bohemia the more real because they were unconscious in it. Its
+components were a cheap furnished room, restaurants like this,
+adventurous companionship in the underworld which thrust itself to the
+surface here and there in that master-port of the Saxon advance. Not
+for months had either of them been in the society of such women as
+these--women who preferred cleanliness to display, women who were
+nice about their nails and hair. A kind of pleasant shyness crept over
+Mark Heath; the spirit came into the face of Bertram Chester. Masters,
+tactician that he was, put the conversation into their hands.
+Presently, they were telling freely about the fare at Coffee John's,
+about their familiars and companions in the little Eddy-Street lodging
+house, about the drifters of the Latin quarter. They quite eclipsed
+the pale youth who was playing escort to Eleanor, and the substantial
+person in the insurance business who seemed to be responsible for Kate
+Waddington. Heath, speaking with a little diffidence and lack of
+assurance, had twice the wit, twice the eye for things, twice the
+illumination of Bertram Chester; yet it was the latter who brought
+laughter and attention. His personality, which surrounded him like an
+aroma, his smile, his trick of the eyes--one listened to Bertram
+Chester.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the son of Louis brought in the little sweet oranges and arranged
+the goblets for black coffee, talk shifted from monologue to dialogue.
+Eleanor found herself talking to Bertram. A kind of pride had been
+rising in her all the evening; a pride born in recoil from her latest
+recollection of him. The episode of that night under the bay tree had
+gone with her clear across the Atlantic. Even the influence of the
+wholly new environment, in which she had grown from a girl recluse to
+a woman, had not served for a long time to erase that ugly stain on
+her memory. Here and now was the man who served so to perturb her
+once--and she could look on him, with her more mature eyes, as an
+attractive, unlicked young cub. She surprised herself taking revenge
+upon the past by a hidden patronage. At once, then, she fell to
+talking of Europe and the splendors she had lived there.
+
+"This reminds me of the places one slips into abroad," she said, "Mr.
+and Mrs. Wark--Lars Wark you know--took me to just such an old ruin in
+Paris. We dined for thirty centimes, I remember, but it was no better
+than this. I've had to go away to know my native city. That is the
+thing which strikes you when you come back--San Francisco is so like
+the Latin cities of Europe, and yet so unlike!"
+
+Kate leaned across her insurance man.
+
+"The Society for the Narration of European Travel is in session, Mr.
+Chester," she said. "I know the joy that Eleanor is having. It was the
+passion of my life after I first got back from abroad."
+
+"Oh, I eat it alive," said Bertram. "I'm strong for seeing Paris." He
+turned back to Eleanor; and her double embarrassment drove her on.
+
+"Such a good time as I had with the Warks--their studio in Munich,
+where I met all the German long-haired artists--a run to Paris in the
+season--the dearest little village on the Coast of Brittany last
+summer--and three weeks in incomparable London at the end. I haven't
+thought of the ranch for a year and a half--Uncle Edward pays me the
+compliment of saying that my profits fell off twenty per cent. under
+Olsen's management--oh, isn't she a dear!"
+
+For Madame Loisel, wearing a beaming and affable manner, had come
+through the door and approached their table. Madame made it a point of
+business honor to promote personal relations with her regular guests,
+asking Jean how he liked the fish, assuring Jacques that the soup
+would be better to-morrow. This visit of hers to the slumming party
+came after a storm in the kitchen, whose French thunders had reached
+the dining room now and then. Louis, the conservative, hated slummers
+and dreaded being "discovered." He ran a restaurant as a social
+institution as well as a business venture. Madame Loisel, with her eye
+on the cash register, longed ardently for slummers who would give
+large tips to Louis the younger, order expensive wines, and put the
+Marseillaise on the way to a twenty-five cent table d'hote dinner.
+From that kitchen squabble, recurrent whenever slummers visited them,
+Madame Loisel swept in haughty determination, leaving Louis to take it
+out on the pots. As she approached the table, all the charm of France
+illuminated her smile.
+
+She invariably paid slummers the compliment of addressing them in
+French.
+
+"_Bonsoir--le souper, plait-il vous_?" she asked.
+
+Eleanor took her up in fluent French, and the talk sparkled back and
+forth between them--reminiscences of this or that restaurant on the
+boulevards which Madame Loisel had known in her youth and which
+Eleanor had visited. Bertram, his mouth open, followed that talk as
+though summoning all his Sophomore French to match a word here and
+there. Kate Waddington, leaning again across her insurance man, was
+the first to break in.
+
+"I myself used to be keen on French when I came back from Europe, but
+I'm out of practice. Please excuse me, Madame, if I speak English. How
+can you do it at this price?"
+
+"It is kind of you to say so, Mademoiselle--economy and honesty."
+
+Masters patted Mark Heath on the knee.
+
+"We can't let you fellows go away from us now. One doesn't get guides
+to the Latin quarter for nothing. Take us somewhere, Mr. Heath--unless
+you're working to-night."
+
+"No, virtue has been rewarded," said Mr. Heath. "I'm off to-night as a
+testimonial of esteem from the City Editor. What shall it be?"
+
+Bertram Chester, taking up the talk again, laid out Kearney Street
+like a bill of fare. Mrs. Masters, casting her vote as chaperone,
+chose the Marionette Theatre tucked away under the shadow of the
+Broadway Jail.
+
+As Eleanor stepped out into California Street, gathering her coat
+about her against a night which had come up windy and raw, Bertram
+took her side with a proprietary air. She turned toward her appointed
+escort. It happened that he was walking ahead with Heath just then,
+holding an argument about the drift of Montgomery Street when it was
+the water front. For several blocks, then, Bertram had her alone. It
+seemed to her that he began just where he left off two years or more
+ago.
+
+"You're even prettier than you used to be," he said caressingly;
+"you've bully eyes. I think I told you that before."
+
+This time, she looked him full in the face and smiled easily.
+
+"Have I? Well I hope you don't mind my saying that they're resting on
+a bonny sight!"
+
+Somewhat taken aback by the directness of this answer, so different
+from the artificial coyness of the girls he knew best in that period
+of his life, Bertram turned in his course.
+
+"You're joshing me," he said.
+
+"Truly I'm not. You are good to look at--eyes and all."
+
+Although balked of his opening, Bertram tried again.
+
+"Well your mouth is just as good as your eyes."
+
+The same quick look into his face, and the same smile, as she
+answered:
+
+"Yours is a little better if anything. It is not only well formed, but
+it becomes delicious when you smile, and it has most attractive
+shadows in the corners."
+
+"Suppose we talk sense," grumbled Bertram.
+
+"Suppose we do; I know you can." They both laughed at this, and all
+the way up Kearney Street she continued her chatter of Europe. Lars
+Wark, who had known her mother, had done everything for her. It had
+been very different from the regular tour; she came back ignorant of
+all the show places from Cologne Cathedral to the Tower. But it had
+been her privilege to see and meet wonderful people. They would not do
+for regular companionship, such people. They struck one, in the end,
+as goblins and trolls; but it had been an experience of a
+lifetime--while it lasted. The Warks had taken her to places which the
+tourist never sees--lost villages in the Black Forest, undiscovered
+corners of London, even.
+
+After a little of this, she drew him on to speak of himself. She had
+heard news of him, she said, from her uncle, who said that he was
+doing well and gave promise of a future in the law. How long had he
+remained on the ranch that summer? This reference put him back into
+his presumptive mood.
+
+"You went away without giving me a chance to say good-bye," he
+complained. "I never saw you again after the party on the lawn."
+
+Her tongue ran away with her.
+
+"I saw you, though," she said.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Oh, at a distance." He caught nothing from her tone, yet a slight
+change did come into her manner, as though something had been drawn
+between them. Then her escort fell in on the other side of Eleanor,
+appropriating her by right and by consent of her attitude.
+
+Now they were in Broadway, skirting the small bake-shops, the dark
+alleys, all the picture scenes of the Latin quarter. At that very
+moment, Miss Waddington drew a little apart from the group clustering
+about Masters and Mark Heath. An Italian baby of three, too late out
+of bed, stood by a cellar rail surveying them with the liquid fire
+which was his eyes. Kate Waddington stooped to pat his head. As she
+raised herself, she was beside Bertram. Nothing more natural than that
+she should fall in, step by step, beside him. He caught step with her,
+but he still looked toward Eleanor.
+
+"Wonderful girl, isn't she?" asked Kate.
+
+"She sure is."
+
+"Her mother," said Kate, "had more wit than any other woman in San
+Francisco--and the men she had!"
+
+"I think Eleanor has inherited _that_ at any rate," she added after a
+pause.
+
+They had reached the door of the Marionette Theatre now. Afterward
+they drank beer at Norman's; and when they broke up, Bertram Chester
+found himself with three invitations to call.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kate Waddington spent that night with Eleanor Gray in the Tiffany
+House on Russian Hill. While they sat before the fireplace, in the
+half-hour of loosened hair and confidences, Eleanor broke a minute of
+silence with the inquiry:
+
+"What did you think of him?" An instant after she let slip this
+impersonal inquiry, she would have given gold to recall it. And if she
+had any hope that Kate Waddington had missed the point, it died in her
+when Kate answered in an indifferent tone:
+
+"He? Oh, he seems to me to be a little promiscuous."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+The Tiffany house--I spare you full description--rambled with many a
+balcony and addition over that hill which rose like a citadel above
+San Francisco. From its Southern windows, one looked clean over the
+city, lying outspread below. Even the Call building, highest eminence
+piled up by man in that vista, presented its roof to the eye. I can
+picture that site no better than by this; Over Judge Tiffany's front
+wall hung an apple tree, gnarled, convoluted, by the buffets of the
+sea wind. In autumn, when the fruit was ripe, stray apples from this
+tree had been seen to tumble from the wall and roll four blocks down
+into the Latin quarter.
+
+From the rear, the house looked out on a hedged and sloping garden,
+quite old, as gardens go in that land, for a pioneer planted it; and
+from the rear gate of that garden it was only a step to the hill
+mount. Thence one came out suddenly to the panorama of the Bay,
+stretching on three sides; a panorama divided, as by the false panels
+of a mural landscape, into three equal marvels. To left, the narrow
+gate, a surge like the rush of a river always in its teeth and the
+bright ocean, colored like smelt-scales, beyond. In front the Roads,
+where all strange crafts from the mysterious Pacific anchored while
+they waited their turns at the docks. Both in foreground and
+background, this panel changed day by day. It might be whalers from
+the Arctic which lay there in the morning, their oils making noisome
+the breeze; it might be a fleet of beaten, battered tramp
+wind-jammers, panting after their fight about the Horn; it might be
+brigs from the South Seas; it might be Pacific steamers, Benicia
+scow-schooners, Italian fishing smacks, Chinese junks--it might be any
+and all of these together. As for the background, that changed not
+every day but every hour what with the shifts of wind, tide and mists.
+Now its tinge was a green-gold betraying pollution of those mountain
+placers which fed the San Joaquin and the mighty Sacramento. Now it
+was blue and ruffled, now black and calm, now slate-gray,--a
+mysterious shade this last, so that when the fog began to shoot
+lances across the waters, these fleets at anchor by Quarantine wharf
+seemed argosies of fairy adventure. Even Tamalpais, the gentle
+mountain which rose beyond everything, changed ever with the change in
+her veil of mist or fog or rain-rift. The third panel, lying far to
+the right, showed first dim mountain ranges and the mouths of mighty
+rivers, and then, nearer by, masts, stacks and shipping, fringing the
+city roofs.
+
+North into this garden ran a small wing of the Tiffany house. Upon the
+death of Alice Gray, Mattie Tiffany had set it apart for Eleanor the
+baby. When, after her years with Billy Gray, Eleanor came back, Mattie
+had refurnished it for the grown baby. The upper story held her
+bedroom and her closets. Below was her own particular living-room.
+This opened by a vine-bordered door into the garden, into that path
+which led up to the bay view.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Judge Tiffany, sitting within the front window to watch the shimmer of
+a pleasant Sunday afternoon on the city roofs below, perceived that
+his wife had walked three times to that garden wall which looked down
+along the drop of Broadway to the Spanish Church.
+
+The second time that he perceived this phenomenon, his eyes showed
+interest; the third he smiled with inner satisfaction and rose to meet
+her return as though by accident. He was leaning upon a cane, getting
+ease of the sciatica which plagued him.
+
+The Judge had aged during the two years since he opened these events.
+He had settled now into the worldly state of a man who rests content
+with the warming sun and the bright air which feed life. But the inner
+soul, whose depth was his philosophy, whose surface his whimsical
+humor--that still burned in his dark blue eyes. Those eyes glistened a
+little as he went on to this, his daily sport.
+
+He met her on the piazza. She had raked the rise of Broadway, which
+one mounted by two blocks of hen-coop sidewalks; and now she was
+inspecting the cross street.
+
+"All the Sherlock Holmes in me," said Judge Tiffany, "tells me that
+Miss Eleanor Gray is going to have a caller, and that Mrs. Edward C.
+Tiffany is in a state of vicarious perturbation.
+
+"Further," continued Judge Tiffany, dropping his hand upon her arm
+with that affectionate gesture which drew all sting his words might
+have carried, "this is no common caller. For that young civil engineer
+and Mr. Perham the painter and Ned Greene, Mrs. Tiffany never blushes;
+but these new attentions to her niece--well, I hope my approach drew
+as much blood from her heart to her countenance twenty-five years
+ago!"
+
+"I--I _am_ perturbed," said Mattie Tiffany. Running rose-bushes, just
+leafing out into their fall greenery, overgrew the pillars beside her.
+These she fell to pruning with her hands, so that she turned away her
+face.
+
+"I see that discipline is relaxing in this family," said Judge
+Tiffany. "Dear, dear, after managing a wife bravely and well for a
+quarter century, to fail in one's age! Mattie, he works in my office,
+this blush-compelling caller; and I told you when I gave him the
+position not to take him up socially for the present!"
+
+"But what was I to do when he telephoned to Eleanor and asked her?"
+Mrs. Tiffany turned her head with a turn of her thought. "Did you hear
+him telephone--was that how you knew?"
+
+"I'd lose all hold on discipline if I revealed my methods."
+
+Judge Tiffany settled himself in an armchair as one prepared to make
+it a long session. "Let's begin at the start. How came he to renew his
+acquaintance with Eleanor, and when, and where--and how much had
+Mattie Tiffany to do with bringing them together again?"
+
+"Not a thing--truly Edward! Some of Eleanor's slumming with Kate
+Waddington and the Masters--they met by accident at a restaurant--Eleanor
+asked him. You remember he was taken with her that afternoon just
+before she went to Europe--the time he mortified me so dreadfully."
+
+"And the time he attracted my attention," said Judge Tiffany. "And now
+behold that youth, who will always get what he wants by frontal
+attack, reading my California cases and wearing out my desk with his
+feet."
+
+"Do you think he will make a good lawyer?" asked Mattie Tiffany. She
+turned full around at this, and the glance she threw into her
+husband's face showed more than a casual matchmaker's interest.
+
+"He'll make a good something," said the Judge. "So far as anyone can
+judge the race from the start. But that isn't why I have him in the
+office. You know how little I care in these days for such practice as
+I have left. I tell myself, of course, that it is my lingering
+interest in life as a general proposition which made me do it--I am
+curious to see before I die how this find of yours is coming out. That
+is what I tell myself. Probably in my very inside heart I know that
+it's something else."
+
+"What else?" asked Mattie.
+
+"This is one of the hidden things which this experiment is to
+discover," said Judge Tiffany. "What made me notice him in the first
+place? What made you invite him to tea on the lawn? What has made you
+and me and Eleanor remember this chance meeting so long--let me
+see--how long was it?"
+
+"A year ago last June," said Mattie. One of her functions in their
+partnership was to hold small details always ready to the hand of the
+wide-thinking Judge.
+
+"Will he go back on me--that's the question," pursued the Judge.
+"Success is probably at the end for him, but he has two ways of
+success open. He may go slowly and well, or fast and ill. Road number
+one: he stays with my moth-eaten old practice, he refurbishes it, he
+earns a partnership; and so to conservative clients and, probably, to
+genuine success." He hesitated.
+
+"And the other road?" asked Mrs. Tiffany.
+
+"Oh, that has many by-paths. He is trying one of them already. The
+stealthy, invaluable Attwood has told me about it. This Mr. Chester
+has made an investment in Richmond lots on information which he had no
+right to use. Never mind the details. If he follows that general
+direction, it will be a flashy success, a pretty worm-eaten crown of
+laurels."
+
+"Like Northrup's," broke in Mrs. Tiffany. That name always jarred on
+their ears. Northrup, ex-congressman, flowery Western orator, all
+Christian love on the surface, all guile beneath--he had taken to
+himself that success which Judge Tiffany might have had but for his
+hesitations of conscience. Theirs was a secret resentment. Judge
+Tiffany's pride would never have let him show the world one glimmer of
+what he felt.
+
+"Suppose he should follow that path--and take up with Northrup," went
+on Judge Tiffany. "Mine honorable opponent has use for such young men
+as our Mr. Chester will prove himself if he follows that
+path--magnetic young men to coax the rabble, young men not too nice on
+moral questions. Well, a boy isn't born with honor, any more than he's
+born with courage; he grows to it. And God only knows just when the
+boy strikes the divide which will turn his course one way or the
+other."
+
+"But Edward, you ought to warn him!"
+
+"In the first place, it would do no good to warn one of his age and
+temperament. In the second place, it would spoil the experiment--but I
+had commanded you to talk, and here I am doing it all. How looked she;
+what said he?"
+
+"To-day--just before church--I was hooking up Kate and Eleanor, and he
+telephoned."
+
+"Instinct, of course, informing you that it was none other than he at
+the other end of the wire?" On another tongue and in another fashion
+of speech, this sentence might have been offensive; between them, it
+was a part of his perpetual game with her amiable weaknesses.
+
+"If I did listen, it was no more than right. It was what a mother
+would have done by Eleanor. I heard her say, 'Good morning Mr.
+Chester,' not at all as though she were surprised to have him call up;
+and I was really quite disturbed. You had told me not to invite him
+here for the present; and I hadn't the slightest reason for knowing
+that Eleanor had seen him since she came back from abroad. Her
+speaking so familiarly--well, I wondered. But Kate--"
+
+"Oh, she was listening too?"
+
+"Well, I know that she hadn't the excuse for listening that I had; but
+I had stopped hooking her up, and it was only natural that she should
+listen too. Eleanor said, 'Certainly I shall be in,' and Kate said,
+'That's the old friend we met with Mr. Masters last night in the Hotel
+Marseillaise. He is prompt!' Rather sharp in Kate, considering what
+Eleanor has been doing for her!
+
+"You'd have thought Eleanor had eaten the canary bird when she came
+back. Of course, she knew we had been listening. I wish she hadn't.
+I'd have liked to see whether she'd have told us then, or waited for
+him to surprise us. Kate was sharp again. I wonder if she isn't
+envious at bottom? After all Eleanor is so much more a lady! Kate said
+again, 'The young man is prompt!'"
+
+Judge Tiffany laughed.
+
+"Oh, that women could dwell together in peace and harmony! Can't you
+grant my playmate Miss Waddington a feminine jab or two?"
+
+"Well, she _is_ nice to you!"
+
+"Did it never occur to you as a virtue in her that she puts herself
+out to entertain--even, Madame, I flatter myself to fancy--a withered
+old codger like me!"
+
+Mrs. Tiffany's first expression flooded her eyes and said, "Is there
+anything strange in liking you?" Her second expression set her mouth
+hard and said, "What is her object?" Her voice said nothing.
+
+"And behold him now," said Judge Tiffany.
+
+There, indeed, came Bertram Chester, visible over their garden wall as
+he toiled up the hen-coop sidewalk. The Judge returned to the house;
+Mattie Tiffany settled herself on the piazza with the preen and
+flutter of a female thing about to be wooed.
+
+The Tiffany drawing-room, panelled simply in woods, furnished with the
+old Sturtevant mahogany, came upon Bertram Chester like a stage
+setting as he entered with Mrs. Tiffany. Upstage, burned a driftwood
+fire in a low hearth of rough bricks; Judge Tiffany sat there, in a
+spindle-backed chair, reading. Across a space broken only by a
+painting, a Japanese print or so, and more spindle-backed chairs,
+Eleanor and Kate had grouped themselves by the piano. Eleanor, turning
+the leaves on the music-rack, looked over her shoulder at him. She was
+in pink that day; the tint of her gown, blending into the tint of her
+fresh skin, contrasted magically with the subdued background. Kate,
+all in white, sat on a hassock pulling a volume from the low book
+shelf. All this came upon Bertram with a soothing sense which he did
+not understand in that stage of his development, did not even
+formulate.
+
+Kate, tripping across the rugs with a lightness which perfectly
+balanced her weight, greeted him first; Eleanor and Judge Tiffany
+shook hands with more reserve. And as Bertram settled himself in an
+arm-chair before the fire, it was the ready Kate who put him at his
+ease by opening fire of conversation.
+
+"Did I tell you, Mrs. Tiffany, about the restaurant which Mr. Chester
+found for us last night? such an evening he gave us! Mr. Chester, who
+is Madame Loisel--you should have seen her, Judge Tiffany--you'd never
+dine at home again. When these young charms fade, I'm going to marry a
+French restaurant-keeper and play hostess to the multitude and be just
+plump and precious like her. How can you ever get past the counter
+with her behind it, Mr. Chester?"
+
+"I'm generally hungry--that's how!" said Bertram Chester.
+
+"That's man for you!" responded Kate. "Judge beloved, if you were a
+young man and Eleanor--I'm too modest to mention myself, you see--were
+what she'll be at forty, and she were behind a counter, and you before
+it, would hunger tear you away? Oh dear, it's such a bore to keep
+one's grammar straight!"
+
+"I ask my wife's permission before giving the answer which is in my
+heart," said Judge Tiffany.
+
+Eleanor broke into the laugh which followed.
+
+"But I would like to know about Madame Loisel."
+
+"Well, she's certainly a ripe pippin; you've seen that," answered
+Bertram, his smile on Eleanor. "And I'd like to know what she's saying
+when she parleys French to the garcons. She's all right if she's
+feeling right, but I've seen her tear the place up when the service
+went bad. I guess she's a square and a pretty good fellow!"
+
+"Tell us more about her--" this from Eleanor.
+
+"About her squareness? Well, there was the time Gentle Willie Purdy
+got drunk. We call him Gentle Willie because he isn't, you know. About
+three o'clock in the morning, he took the notion it was dinner time
+and climbed the side gate to the Hotel Marseillaise and pounded at the
+door. He faded out about then, he says. When he woke up, he was laid
+out on a couch, with a towel on his head, and Madame was bringing him
+black coffee. He tried to thank her after he felt better; and what do
+you think she said? 'Meester Purdy, nevaire, nevaire come to eat in
+thees place again.' She stayed with it too!"
+
+"Good for her!" said Mrs. Tiffany, reaching for her crewel work.
+
+"Oh, yes," responded Mr. Chester in the uncertain tone of one who
+gives assent for politeness without knowing exactly why.
+
+"If I ever depart from the straight and narrow paths and get drunk,
+may I have Madame Loisel to hold my head," cried Kate.
+
+The talk ran, then, into conventional channels--the news, the latest
+novel, and the season's picking at the ranch. Judge Tiffany dropped
+out gradually, and resumed his book; and more and more did Bertram
+direct his talk, salted and seasoned with his magnetism, toward
+Eleanor. Kate Waddington, left out of the conversation through three
+or four exchanges, crossed the room and draped herself on a hassock at
+the feet of Judge Tiffany.
+
+"Judge darling," she said in an aside which penetrated to the furthest
+corner of the room, "I'm going back to my unsympathetic home before
+tea. Don't you think we're well enough chaperoned to go on with our
+flirtation just where we left off?"
+
+"Where was I when we were interrupted?" asked Judge Tiffany, leaning
+forward.
+
+"Twenty-fourth page, fifth chapter," said Kate. "I was just getting
+you jealous and you were trying not to show it. Mr. Chester--oh excuse
+me--well, I've broken in now, so I might as well get the reward of my
+impoliteness--may I use you to make Judge Tiffany jealous?"
+
+"Sure you can!" answered Bertram.
+
+"Oh, he won't do at all!" Kate was addressing Judge Tiffany again.
+"He's entirely too eager. Who would be a good rival anyway, Judge
+adored? Let's create one, like the picture of your future husband in a
+nickel vaudeville!"
+
+"Eleanor," spoke Mrs. Tiffany, "suppose you show Mr. Chester your end
+of the house and our garden--or would you like it, Mr. Chester? We're
+rather proud of the garden."
+
+"I'd like it," answered Bertram; and he rose instantly. Mrs. Tiffany
+made no move to accompany them; she sat bent over her yarns, her ears
+open. And she noticed, at the moment when Bertram made that abrupt
+movement from his chair, how Kate hesitated in the middle of a
+sentence, as though confused.
+
+The rehearsed flirtation between Kate and Judge Tiffany faded into a
+game of jackstones on the floor.
+
+Mrs. Tiffany heard the double footsteps fade down the hall, heard the
+garden door open and close. After a short interval, she heard the door
+again, and the dim footsteps sounded for but a moment. They had
+turned, evidently, into Eleanor's own living room. Would they stop
+there, these two, for a talk--yes, her gentle treble, his booming
+bass, drifted down the hall. Presently Mrs. Tiffany heard Eleanor's
+laugh, followed by his. In that instant, she looked at the jackstone
+players by the hearth. Kate, on the crackle of that laugh, had
+arrested all motion. A jack which she had tossed in the air, descended
+with no hand to stop it. For a moment, Kate held that intent pose;
+then,
+
+"Judge wonderful, I'm a paralytic at times. You for twosies." She
+swept the jacks towards him with one of her characteristic gestures,
+free and yet deft.
+
+A bell rang in the outer hall, and the maid entered.
+
+"Miss Waddington is wanted at the telephone," she announced.
+
+Eleanor, when she saw that her visitor had no intention of rejoining
+the party, commanded him to smoke. He rolled a cigarette, Western
+fashion, from powdered tobacco and brown paper, and disposed himself
+in the window-seat, one leg drawn up under him, his big shoulders
+settled comfortably against the wall. Eleanor began to talk fluently,
+superficially, with animation. She felt from the first that he was
+throwing himself against her barriers, trying to reach at once the
+deeper stages of acquaintance. His direct look seemed both to plead
+and to command. She outwitted two or three flanking movements before
+he took advantage of a pause and charged her entrenchments direct.
+
+"I've said it before, but I'm going to keep on. You are pretty."
+
+"Thank you," she replied; and smiled--mainly at the ingenuousness of
+this, although partly at the contrast between her present view of him
+and that old memory.
+
+"Oh, it never seems to bother you when I say that," went on Bert
+Chester, bending his rather large and compelling black-brown eyes upon
+her. "Some girls would get sore, and some would like it; you never pay
+any attention. That's one of the ways you're different."
+
+("Heavens--is he making love already--he is sudden!" thought Eleanor
+with amusement.)
+
+"You are, you know. I picked you for different the first time I saw
+you. I wondered then if you were beautiful--I always knew you had nice
+eyes--and it isn't so much that you've changed, as that the longer a
+man looks at you the prettier you are."
+
+"Shall we discuss other things than me?" asked Eleanor.
+
+"Why shouldn't we talk about you? I've never had a chance before--just
+think, it's the first time ever I saw you alone--even that time on the
+ranch a bull chaperoned us!" This minor joke, like every play of his
+spirit, gained a hundred times its own inherent effect by sifting
+through his personality. She smiled back to his smile at the boyish
+ripples about his mouth and eyes.
+
+"You see, it means a lot when a girl sticks in a man's mind that way,"
+he continued. "Why, I've carried you around right through my Senior
+year at college and my first year out. So of course, it must mean
+something."
+
+The open windows of Eleanor's bower looked out upon a bay tree, a
+little thing awaiting its slaughter--for shade trees might not grow
+too near the windows in San Francisco. It was flopping its
+lance-leaves against the panes; puffs of the breeze brought in a
+suggestion of its pungency. That magic sense, so closely united with
+memory--it brought back a faint impression upon her. Her very panic at
+this ghost of old imaginations inspired the inquiry, barbed and
+shafted with secret malice:
+
+"How many really nice girls have you known in that time?"
+
+Bertram, sitting in considerable comfort on the window seat, flashed
+his eyes across his shoulder to her.
+
+"Oh, a few in my Senior year, not many this year. What's a man going
+to do on twelve a week?" She noticed the indelicacy of this, since he
+spoke in the house of his employer. But the next sentence from him was
+even more startling:
+
+"The last time I was in love was down in High School at Tulare. She's
+married a fellow in the salt business now. I guess she was pretty:
+anyway, her hair was the color of molasses candy. I wrote a poem to
+her the first day I saw her."
+
+"A poem?" asked Eleanor.
+
+"You do well to ask that," said Bertram, throwing on one of those
+literary phrases by which, in the midst of his plain, Anglo-Saxon
+speech, he was recalling that he was a university man. "It rhymed,
+after a fashion."
+
+"You don't know how to be in love until you're older," he went on.
+
+("Even that bay scent brings up only wonder, not emotion; and I can
+laugh at him all the way," she thought. Yet in this tiny triumph
+Eleanor was not entirely happy. The vision, a little disturbing, a
+little shameful, but yet sweet, was quite gone.)
+
+"Tell me about this girl with the molasses hair. She interests me. And
+a lot about yourself."
+
+"Oh, I've forgotten most about her long ago. And I've something else
+to remember now, I hope. I'd like to talk about myself, though. I'd
+like some girl to hear about my ambitions. I really think it would do
+me good."
+
+He stopped, as though expecting an answer. None came. He bent his eyes
+closer on her and repeated:
+
+"It would!"
+
+And at that moment, a pair of high heels tapped in the doorway, a
+cheerful voice called for admission through the portieres, and enter
+Kate Waddington. Mr. Chester, Eleanor saw, rose to her entrance as one
+who has not always risen for women; there was something premeditated
+about the movement.
+
+"Mrs. Tiffany said you two were in here," she began in her full, rich
+contralto, "and I made so bold, Nell--Mrs. Masters is taking a party
+over to their ranch next Sunday. One of her men has disappointed her
+and she's just telephoned to give me the commission to fill his place.
+Mr. Chester, you are an inspiration sent straight from Heaven. Any
+other man, positively any other, would be a second choice--but she
+didn't know you when she made up the party, so how could she have
+invited you?"
+
+She paused and threw an arch look past Eleanor.
+
+"Sure I'll come!" said Bertram, jarred into the vernacular by his
+internal emotion of pleasant surprise. "Sure--I'd be delighted."
+
+"I told Mrs. Masters you'd be the ready accepter," said Kate.
+
+"You're going too, aren't you?" asked Bertram of Eleanor.
+
+"No; I had to decline, I'm sorry to say."
+
+"And I'm sorry; blame sorry." He turned back toward Kate Waddington,
+and she, the lightning-minded, read his expression. He had made a
+great _faux pas_; he had seemed more eager toward Eleanor, to whom he
+owed no gratitude for the invitation, than toward her.
+
+"Would you care to drop in on Mrs. Masters as you go down town to let
+her know that you are coming? Or if you wish I'll tell them--I'm going
+now--that way." Her tone gave the very slightest hint of pique; her
+attitude put a suggestion. The game, plain as day to Eleanor, raised
+up in her only a film of resentment. Mainly, she was enjoying the
+humor of it.
+
+Bertram rose promptly.
+
+"It is time I was going," he said. "I've enjoyed myself very much,
+Miss Gray. If you don't mind, I'd like to come to see you again."
+
+"And I'll get into my things," said Kate.
+
+They all moved toward the door.
+
+Kate passed first; then Eleanor. There hung beside the door-casing a
+hook, designed to hold the portiere cord. Eleanor brushed too close;
+it caught in the lace at her throat. She pulled up with a jerk, gave a
+little cry; the lace held fast. She turned--in the wrong direction.
+
+Bertram saw this tiny accident; he sprang forward, caught the lace,
+disentangled her. And to do so, he must reach about her so that his
+arms, never quite touching her, yet surrounded her as a circle
+surrounds its centre. She turned and looked up to thank him, surprised
+him, surprised herself, in that position.
+
+And a wave which was fear and loathing and longing and agitation ran
+over her with the speed of an electric current, and left her weak.
+
+Her face, with its own sweet inscrutability, showed little change of
+expression; but he caught a dullness and then a glitter of her eye, a
+heave of her bosom, a catch of her breath. As he stood there, his
+great frame towering above her, something which she feared might be
+comprehension came into his eyes. And--
+
+"You make a picture--you two there!" called Kate Waddington from
+without. The transitory expression in his eyes--Eleanor saw it now
+with triumph--was that of one who has thrown a pearl away. But he
+followed.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dining with Mark Heath in the Hotel Marseillaise that night, Bertram
+fell into a spell of musing, a visible melancholy uncommon in him; for
+his ill-humors, like his laughters, burned short and violent. Mark
+Heath--by this time he was growing into a point of view on his chum
+and room mate--remarked it with some amusement and more curiosity.
+
+Mark was casting about for an opening, when Bertram anticipated him.
+Staring into the dingy wall of the Hotel Marseillaise, past the
+laborers, the outcasts, the French cabmen purring over their cabbage
+soup, he said in a tone of musings:
+
+"When Bert Chester grows up and gets rich, he'll take unto himself a
+wife. We'll live in a big house in the Western Addition with a bay
+frontage. It will be furnished with dinky old dull stuff, and those
+swell Japanese prints and paintings. And I'll have two autos and a toy
+ranch in the country to play with. We'll give little dances in the big
+hall downstairs. I'll lead the opening dance with the missus, and then
+I'll just take a dance or so with the best looking girls--the ones I
+take a special cotton to. I'll have my home sweet home dance with the
+missus--" he fell again to musing.
+
+"A man up a tree," said Mark Heath, "would say you were in love."
+
+"I'll be damned--I wonder if that ain't the matter?" said Bertram
+Chester.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The Ferry, doorway to San Francisco, wore its holiday Sunday aspect as
+Bertram Chester approached it. A Schuetzen Park picnic was gathering
+itself under the arches, to the syncopated tune of a brass band. The
+crowd blazed with bright color. The young men, in white caps, yellow
+sashes of their mysterious fraternity, and tinted neckties like the
+flowers of spring, lolled and larked and smoked about the pillars. Fat
+mothers and stodgy fathers fussed over baskets and progeny. Young
+girls, in white dresses and much trimming of ribbons, coquetted in
+groups as yet unbroken by the larking young men. Over these ceremonial
+white dresses of the Sunday picnic, they wore coats and even furs
+against the damp, penetrating morning--rather late in the season it
+was for picnics. In the rests of the ragtime, rose the aggressive
+crackle of that flat, hard accent, with its curious stress on the "r,"
+which would denote to a Californian in Tibet the native of South of
+Market, San Francisco.
+
+Bertram Chester, had he been accustomed to spare any of his powers for
+introspective imagination, might have beheld his crossroads, his
+turning point, in this passage through the South of Market picnic to
+the little group waiting, by the Sausalito Ferry, to take him to the
+Masters ranch. But a month ago, he himself had whistled up that
+infatuated little milliner's apprentice who was his temporary light of
+love, and had taken her over to Schuetzen Park of a Sunday. He had
+drunk his beer and shaken for his round of drinks with the boys, had
+taken the girl away from a young butcher, had fought and conquered the
+bookmaker's clerk who tried to take away the milliner's apprentice
+from him, and had gone home, when the day was done, with his head
+buried on that soft curve of the feminine shoulder which was made to
+receive tired male heads.
+
+Now, without a backward look, he was walking toward Sydney Masters,
+Mrs. Masters, the sprightly and dainty Kate Waddington, and those
+others, grouped about them, who might be guides and companions on his
+new way.
+
+Kate Waddington had acquainted him in advance with the party, so that
+the introductions brought no surprises. That young-old man with the
+sharp little face was Harry Banks, mine owner, millionaire, and figure
+about town--every one in San Francisco knew him or knew about him.
+That tall, swaying girl with the repressed mouth, the abundant hair
+coiled about her head, the rather dull expression, was Marion
+Slater--"she paints miniatures and hammers brass and does all kinds of
+art stunts," Kate had said. That tall young man, who radiated good
+manners, was Dr. Norman French; that little woman, all girl, was Alice
+Needham, his fiancee. "They play juvenile lead in this crowd," had
+been Kate's phrase for them.
+
+Kate, taking possession of Bertram at once, gave him her bag to carry,
+and, as the gates opened and the whistle blew, she walked beside him.
+From the upper deck, this Masters party watched that city panorama,
+spread on the hills for all to see, roll away from them, the wheeling
+flocks of gulls trailing the craft in the roads, the surge of golden
+waters rolling in from the Gate. A morning mood blew in upon the
+winds; the party became gay.
+
+Bertram, in the rise of his morning spirits, performed certain
+cub-like gambols for the benefit of Kate Waddington. The company
+failed not to notice that he had assisted her up the gangway by
+slipping his hand under her elbow. On the deck, he cut her out
+immediately from the rest, insisted on tucking her veil into his
+pocket, made a pretence of trying to take her hand. Even Kate found it
+hard to parry these advances. Banks, slouching back on a bench in his
+easy, indolent attitude, looked over toward them, and his mouth
+tightened and set. So much had he been courted for his wealth and
+personality, this Harry Banks, that among his familiars he assumed the
+privilege of falling into moods without reason or preliminary notice.
+His present mood was a perverse one; and he took it out on its reason
+for being--this presumptuous outsider.
+
+"Me Gawd, Jimmie, but me belt hurts!" he called out suddenly in his
+richest imitation of the South of Market dialect. With his light step
+of a dancer, he skipped over to Kate Waddington, whirled her to her
+feet, and began to waltz about the forward deck, imitating the
+awkward, contorted, cheek-to-cheek style of the Schuetzen Park picnic.
+Kate, who fell in at once with every invitation, had laughed as he
+began to whirl her, but she flushed too. The whole upper deck was
+craning necks to stare. Mrs. Masters caught her breath and whispered,
+"Oh, don't!" Dr. French and Alice Needham fell to talking apart, as
+though repudiating, in their embarrassment, such company. Marion
+Slater, sitting at ease on her bench, cast one glance at Harry Banks
+as he whirled to face her. His eyes fell; on the next turn, he waltzed
+Kate back to her seat. The relationship between these two was a puzzle
+to their familiars. He, the uncaught bachelor, the flaneur, the
+epicurean, he who lived for his pleasures, taking them with a
+calculated moderation that he might preserve the power to enjoy; she,
+the etiolated, the subtle, the earnest follower of art, she who seemed
+always a little too earnest and conventional for that group of the
+frivolous and unconventional rich--people had wondered for years how
+there could be anything between them. These two alone understood that
+the bond was of the mind, not of the flesh or the spirit. She but
+thought, and he thought with her; she but lifted her eyebrow or moved
+her hand, and the motion translated itself to speech in his mind. That
+glance of her had made his mind say, "I am making them all
+ridiculous."
+
+And, like the spoiled child that he was, he ceased from one
+naughtiness only to plunge into another and worse one. As Kate dropped
+to the bench, he looked at Bertram and said:
+
+"You try it; I am a little rusty." One of his rare embarrassments
+flamed into the face of Bertram Chester. The shot had gone more truly
+than Harry Banks could have known.
+
+"No, thank you," Bertram said simply, and flushed again.
+
+Masters spoke up from his corner:
+
+"Well, Chester, you ought to be a good dancer if build counts--though
+I shouldn't like to have you showing off your accomplishment right
+here--you might lack the public finish of the Banks style. You big
+football fellows always have the call on the little men in dancing.
+It is a matter of bulk and base, I think." The ferry boat was passing
+Alcatraz now, and the populace had turned its attention away from
+Harry Banks and his party. The spoiled child kept straight ahead.
+
+"They make real, ball-room gents," he said. He turned toward Marion on
+this; turned as though he could not keep his look away. She lifted her
+eyebrow again, and he fell into a sulky silence.
+
+The others rushed to the first refuge of tact--personalities. After a
+moment, Banks joined the talk; and then appeared another aspect of his
+perverse mood. He took the conversation into his own hands, and he
+talked of nothing which could by any chance include Bertram Chester,
+the callow newcomer, the outsider. It was all designed to show, it did
+show, how intimate they were, how many old things they had in
+common--never a passage in which Bertram could join by any excuse.
+Even so did Banks direct it as to draw Kate Waddington into the talk.
+Bertram sat apart, then, his face showing all his displeasure. His
+straight brows set themselves in a frown, which he bent sometimes at
+the group volleying personalities at Harry Banks, and sometimes on
+the terraced hills of Sausalito.
+
+When they trooped off with the crowd, Kate fell in beside Bertram
+again. Lagging deliberately, she let a group of picnickers come in
+between them and the rest of their party. He was still frowning.
+
+"I'd like to soak that man," he said. "Maybe I will."
+
+"No you won't!" said she.
+
+"Won't I?" he replied.
+
+"Oh, don't think I haven't seen it all. He was horrid. You see, we've
+got used to him. You're meeting him new, and you don't quite
+understand him yet."
+
+"Well, I'm going to spend no sleepless nights trying!"
+
+"He's really very clever and kind, at bottom. You'll come to like him
+as we all do. And he's a man that it's good for you to know."
+
+Bertram seemed to be considering this.
+
+"Well, what did he mean, anyway?" he snapped.
+
+"Nothing. It's just his foolery. We all had to take it from him at
+first--and then we came to appreciate him."
+
+Bertram answered with an impatient gesture. Kate caught his arm, held
+it for just a second.
+
+"Now, you wouldn't spoil my day, would you?" she asked softly. "You
+know I'm responsible for you--"
+
+His frown melted into his smile.
+
+"Sure, if you put it like that!"
+
+"Now, you're a sensible, accommodating, self-restrained lad, and every
+other adjective in Samuel Smiles. You could charm the buttons off a
+policeman--and you'll see how really nice he can be."
+
+"You'll take out time until I get over my grouch?"
+
+"Of course." They were approaching Masters and Dr. French, who stood
+waiting by the train platform. "Late and happy!" she called.
+
+Harry Banks, walking ahead beside Marion Slater, had taken his own
+wordless rebuke from her. During the train passage, he made the
+concession of keeping away from Bertram, and grouped himself off in
+the other double seat. Bertram, sitting with Kate and the engaged
+couple, spoke but seldom and then languidly. He did not come face to
+face with Harry Banks again until the buckboards had delivered them
+at the Masters ranch.
+
+This estate bore the title of "ranch" only by courtesy. Masters
+himself said that he raised nothing but mild Hell on his forty acres.
+He did have an olive orchard, a small orange grove flourishing by luck
+of a warm gorge in the hills, and a little fancy stock. Kate and
+Masters took possession of the new guest at the gate, and carried him
+over the estate for inspection. Mainly, Bertram took this
+entertainment sullenly. He warmed a little at the sight of the cattle.
+The house, built by Masters's own design, drew only the comment,
+"pretty nice." After that, Bertram was free to go to his room and
+dispose his belongings. Returning in a marvelously short time, he came
+out upon the house-party, grouped all in the big, redwood ceiled
+living-room.
+
+A fire of driftwood snapped with metallic crackling on the hearth.
+Alice Needham sat with Dr. French beside it; Mrs. Masters, pausing in
+a flight of supervision, had stopped to speak with them; Alice was
+looking up at her, presenting her fresh, full-faced view to the gaze
+of the man on the staircase. Marion Slater stood with Masters by one
+of the Dutch windows, criticizing the design with a painter's half-arm
+gestures. Banks, by another window, sat dividing his time between a
+book and the valley below.
+
+It happened then, as Bertram stood there, that Alice Needham looked in
+his direction. It happened, also, that she was smiling. He caught her
+smile and smiled back.
+
+That smile was half the secret of his physical charm. In the first
+place, it broke with wholly unexpected force. His face, what with
+its heaviness of feature, was a little forbidding and severe. As he
+bent his unillumined gaze, he appeared stern--even angry. Then, with
+the sudden preliminary vibration of an earthquake, that smile
+would begin to quiver about his mouth, to start wrinkles about his
+eyes. Next, as he bent his head forward toward the target of his
+charms, it drew back the corners of his mouth to show his white teeth,
+it pulled eyelids and eyebrows into a tiny slit, through which his
+pupils twinkled like electric sparks. These movements--wholly
+muscular at that--spiritualized and transformed his face.
+
+Mrs. Masters, looking up at the interruption, was caught in this
+flood of charm and good will. Harry Banks, feeling a psychic current
+running about the room, looked up also; and that smile caught him. It
+carried away the last trace of his perverse mood. And Bertram heaved
+himself down the stairs and crossed at once to seat himself beside
+Alice Needham.
+
+"I see at a glance I'm going to like this party," he said. On other
+lips there would have been nothing to laugh at in this; but they all
+did laugh. In a minute more, Harry Banks had dropped his book and
+crossed over to the fireplace. Bertram, leading the talk now, took him
+in without a trace of apparent resentment. Kate, emerging from the
+room, dropped down beside Harry Banks on the floor and joined her
+cheerful pipe to the symphony of good fellowship. Before luncheon,
+this find of hers was the centre of the party; events were revolving
+about him.
+
+In the lazy hour after meat, the engaged couple found chance to slip
+out into the orange grove. Masters, summoned by his foreman, went to
+look after a sick cow, Harry Banks went back to his reading, and Alice
+Needham to a design for a window seat which she was building for the
+Masters dining-room. These pairings left Bertram and Kate to each
+other; and presently they were out-of-doors, drawing on into the
+woods. Masters, from the barn, watched them and noted what a goodly
+couple, what a faun and dryad in clothes, they were. Kate Waddington
+was turning over her shoulder her slow and rather lazy smile, which
+began at her lips and lit her green-grey eyes last of all. That was
+her best attitude of head. Bertram swung up the trail, making progress
+by main force--not walking so much as lifting himself on those sturdy,
+saddle-sprung legs of his. He was making wide, sweeping gestures; and
+Kate, as he talked, leaned a little toward him now and then, like a
+woman absorbed.
+
+Momentarily, she had him on the subject of football. He was touching
+upon the subject of one Bill Graham, Stanford tackle and opponent in
+two varsity games, whom she knew and whom he was teaching her to know
+better. Bertram stooped and gathered a handful of pebbles from the
+trail to show how Bill Graham used to throw sand in his eyes; he
+thrust his open hand against an alder, bordering the trail, to show
+how he contravened these tactics by slamming Bill Graham in the face.
+Even so far did loosen his tongue and spirit that he boasted of his
+victories and excused his defeats. He went further; he touched upon
+the most frightful disappointment of his career.
+
+"It was in the ten to nothing game," said he. "You remember, don't
+you, how they had us down on our ten yard line early in the second
+half? We got the ball away. Nobody had scored yet. Well, Stuffy Halpin
+he gave the signal for a delayed pass on end. That was a freak play we
+were trying out that year--delayed pass first and then the back passed
+to me. I jogged Bill Graham and he stumbled down the field just
+bull-headed--he never did have much football sense. I looked down
+toward the goal"--(Bertram had been gesticulating wildly; now he gave
+the outstretched fingers of his right hand a sudden fillip to show the
+changed direction of his glance) "and I saw a clear field right
+straight to the fullback or glory--"
+
+"Gracious! What happened?" asked Kate. She was capable, wit and social
+strategist that she was, of assuming all this interest by way of
+leading an inept youth to make a fool and a braggart of himself for
+her amusement. But she showed not a glimmer of irony, neither in her
+mouth nor in her green-grey eyes. She spoke with the straight, sincere
+interest of a dairymaid listening to the self-told heroisms of a
+stable boy.
+
+"Stuffy tumbled all over himself and dropped the ball!"
+
+Bertram's answer conveyed all the tragedy in the world.
+
+They were come now to a place where the trail ran steep and the
+redwoods thickened to make a Californian hillside. It was November,
+but the season was late. The earth was washed bright by the early
+rains and not yet sodden with the later ones. The black, shaded loam,
+bare of grass, oozed the moisture it was saving for its evergreen
+redwoods against a rainless summer. In the dark clefts grew scentless
+things of a delicate, gnome aspect--gold-back fern, maiden-hair
+overlying dank, cold pools, sorrel, six-foot brake. No blossoms blew
+among all this greenery; only by that sign and by the wet, perspiring
+earth might one know that it was autumn on those hills.
+
+The clean ooze and dew started a little stream which ran, choked with
+maiden-hair, to the trail, and formed a pool. Some philanthropic
+camper had driven a nail into the rock and hung there a tin cup. Kate
+(Bertram still talking and gesticulating at her left) threw a
+perceptive glance.
+
+"How good the water looks!" she said. "I believe I am thirsty!"
+
+While he filled the cup, she seated herself on the rock, disposed
+herself into a composition; and after they had both drunk, she showed
+no disposition to move from her perch. In fact, she loosened her brown
+student beri, shook her hair free, and sat there, a wood-nymph framed
+by the ruddy brown and dark green of redwood and laurel. He crouched
+his big frame down beside her, so that she leaned back against the
+rock. A long silence, and:
+
+"Nature is mighty nice!" he said.
+
+Then, perceiving her as a part of the picture, he added:
+
+"And you're the nicest thing about it."
+
+At this frontal attack, Kate waited to see whether it meant further
+attack, skirmish, or retreat. His general softness of expression,
+showed that it meant attack.
+
+Bertram, in fact, was in the mood for attack on rose citadels. A year
+of life on twelve dollars a week--cheap, crowded lodgings, meals at
+the Hotel Marseillaise, the landlady's daughter and those of her kind
+for companionship--and now, in a week, the refinements of the Tiffany
+house, the refinement plus entertainment of the Masters villa, and
+these two lovely, fragrant women. It seemed all to roll up in him as
+he sat there, the woods about him and this golden creature at his
+side; and it found half-unconscious expression on his lips.
+
+"I'm going to be rich some day," he said.
+
+"I hope so."
+
+"I am, sure. When I get rich I'm going to have a place like this--I'll
+have a long pull by that time and be able to invite anybody I
+want--this is the only way to live." His voice fell away.
+
+Then he looked up and bent upon her that smile.
+
+"It's great to have a girl like you to confide in," he said.
+
+"Thank you; but you haven't confided much as yet," responded Kate.
+
+"I don't suppose there is a whole lot to confide. At least, things
+you'd want to tell a girl like you. Only one thing. I'm in love!"
+
+The arrest of all motion in Kate which followed this declaration was
+like one of those sudden calms which fall over a field at the approach
+of evening. It descended upon her in the mid-course of a gesture; it
+wrapped her about in such a stillness that neither breath nor blood
+stirred. Then, though only her lips moved, her vocal cords responded
+to her will.
+
+"And she is to be mistress of the villa when you get rich?"
+
+"If she'll take me," said Bertram. "You see, it is a brand new case.
+I've just got it--just realized it. She's up and I'm still down, so it
+wouldn't be square to say anything about it, now would it?"
+
+"No," answered Kate softly, "though we women like bold lovers too."
+
+"Yes, that's so. And I suppose if I keep too still about it, somebody
+else will come riding onto the ranch and carry her off. It's my game,
+I guess, to stay around and watch. And if I find any gazebo getting
+too thick with her, then up speaks little Bertie for the word that
+makes her his.
+
+"If she'll have me," he added. "But she's a good many pegs above me
+just now and I've got more than a living to make. Of course, that'll
+come all right if I have fair luck. If it was easy money plugging my
+way through college, it will be easy plugging it through the world.
+Don't you size it up about that way?"
+
+Kate clasped her hands and leaned forward.
+
+"If you're playing the long game, I suppose so. But wouldn't you do
+better at least to hint to the girl?"
+
+"I guess you can advise me about that," said he. "Better than anybody
+I know. Suppose I tell you all about it?" A little panic ran through
+the nerves of Kate.
+
+"Now?" she said, "are--are you ready?"
+
+"Now-time is good-time," he said. "Well, I guess you've savveyed just
+who it is and what's the matter. It's--it's Miss Gray--Eleanor Gray."
+
+To the end of her days, Kate Waddington remembered to be thankful for
+a certain cotton-tail rabbit. At that moment precisely, this fearling
+of the woods streaked down the trail, pursued by a dog whose heavy
+crashing sounded in the distance; came out upon them, whirled with a
+loud roaring of fern and leaves, screamed the heart-rending scream of
+a frightened rabbit, and dashed off into the wood. The sound, coming
+in this tender moment, betrayed Bert Chester into a guilty start. So,
+when he looked back, her face was as smoothly beautiful as ever and
+she was even smiling.
+
+"You lucky boy!" she said. And then, "I don't blame you. I wouldn't
+blame any man." Bertram fairly glowed.
+
+"I knew you'd agree with me," he said. "Say, what chance do I
+stand--honest, what do you believe she thinks of me?"
+
+"Honest, I never heard her say. It is likely she hasn't begun to think
+of it at all. Women are slower than men about such things. How long
+have you been--in love with her?"
+
+"Of course, I've been that way ever since I saw her first--ever since
+I was a student, picking prunes for her uncle, and went down and
+helped her run a bull off her place. I thought then that I never saw
+nicer eyes or a more ladylike girl. She's always given me the glassy
+eye. I think she hates me--no, it isn't that, either. She just feels
+superior to me."
+
+"Oh, perhaps not that!"
+
+"Well, anyhow, I was in college and any one girl looked about the same
+to me as any other--" Bertram wrinkled his brows in contempt for his
+utter, undeveloped youngness of two years before--"but I remembered
+her always. When I saw her sitting in the Hotel Marseillaise that
+evening, I felt queer; and after I called on her I just knew I had it.
+Funny, you coming in that afternoon. You and I have hit it off so
+well, and here I'm confiding in you! It was a regular luck sign, I
+think."
+
+Kate's voice, when she spoke, fell to its deeper, richer tones.
+
+"And I'm sure I feel flattered--any girl would. I really thank
+you--you don't know how much."
+
+"And you'll help me, won't you?"
+
+"With my advice--yes."
+
+"Well, that's all I want. If I win this game, I want to win it
+square.
+
+"Say, you are sure the goods. You're as pretty--it wouldn't be natural
+for a man to say you're as pretty as she is, but a man can just look
+at you and wonder--" and here he dropped one of his hands gently upon
+hers. She let it rest there a moment before she drew away.
+
+"We'd better be going back," she said. "They'll think it's I and not
+Eleanor, if we stay so long."
+
+As they started, he stooped to get her another drink. Standing above
+him, her hand lifted toward her student beri, she bent her gaze on his
+back. A peculiar look it was, as though an effort against pain. It
+faded into an expression like hunger.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+It seemed afterward to Bertram Chester, reviewing the early events of
+a life in which he was well pleased, that his real attack on things,
+his virtual beginning, came with that house-party of the Masters's.
+The victory of his smile on the staircase he followed up that evening
+to a general conquest. For Masters, when dinner was over, brewed a hot
+punch. They drank it about the driftwood fire, and even the severe
+Marion Slater relaxed and made merry. The essence of the gods strips
+self-control and delicacy first, so that the finer wit goes by without
+tribute of a laugh and the wit of poked fingers--especially if it be
+sauced by personality--rules at the board. After the punch had worked
+sunshine in them, the poked finger of this young barbarian was more
+compelling than the sallies of Masters or the mimicry of Harry Banks.
+
+When the party dispersed at the Sausalito Ferry and scattered for a
+workaday Monday, he found himself accepting invitations left and
+right. Dr. French asked him to motor out to the Cliff House that very
+night; Mrs. Masters wanted him to dinner; Harry Banks must have him
+over to his ranch under Tamalpais. Kate Waddington, mounting the steps
+to Banks's automobile, slipped him a farewell word.
+
+"You were a success," she said. "That's the reward of naughty little
+boys when they reform!"
+
+"Well, I'd have liked to smash his face just the same--then."
+
+"You've done better than that--you've quite conquered him. I'll see
+you Wednesday at the Masters? Good bye!"
+
+Bertram Chester sold forthwith the Richmond lots, his first venture in
+business, to get ready money for the wisest or the most foolish
+investment which a young man of affairs can make in the beginning of
+his career--general society. With all his youth, his energy and his
+eager attack on things, he plunged into the life of San Francisco.
+Only in that city of easy companionships and careless social
+scrutinies would such a sudden rise have been possible. His furnished
+room, where he used to read and study of evenings in his years of
+beginnings, knew him no more before midnight. He dropped away from
+those comrades of the lower sort with whom he had found his
+recreation; abandoned and forgotten were his old lights of love. The
+milliner's apprentice, a coarsely pretty little thing, used to wait
+for him sometimes on the doorstep. Mark Heath, coming home one night
+earlier than usual, found her there, took her for a walk about the
+block, and conveyed to her the unpleasant news that Bertram was now
+flying higher than her covey. After that, she came no more; and the
+first phase of his life in San Francisco drifted definitely back of
+Bertram Chester.
+
+We shall stop with him only three or four times in the course of that
+winter wherein he made his beginnings. Before it was over, he had
+entered, by the special privilege accorded such characters, the club
+about which man-society in San Francisco revolved; he had broken into
+a half a dozen circles of women society; he had become
+hail-fellow-well-met with the younger sons of the cocktail route, the
+loud characters of flashy Latin quarter studios, the returned Arctic
+millionaires of the hour and day who kept the Palace Hotel prosperous,
+the patrons and heroes of the prize-fight games, the small theatrical
+sets of that small metropolis. Sometimes he flashed in a night through
+four or five such circles.
+
+He hung of late afternoons over bars, exchanging that brainless but
+well-willed talk by which men of his sort come to know men. He sat
+beside roped rings to witness the best muscle of the world--and not
+the worst brain--revive in ten thousand men the primeval brute. He
+frolicked with trifling painters, bookless poets, apprentice
+journalists, and the girls who accrued to all these, through wild
+studio parties in Latin quarter attics. He sat before the lace,
+mahogany, crimson lights and cut glass of formal dinners, whereat,
+after the wine had gone round, his seat became head of the table.
+
+From these meetings and revels, whereby he made his way along the path
+of dalliance in the easiest, most childish, most accepting city of the
+Western world, two or three kaleidoscopic flashes remained in his
+maturer memory. The night of the football game, for example, he
+strayed into the annual pitched battle of noise and reproach at the
+Yellowstone between the California partisans and the Stanford
+fanatics. A California graduate, his companion along the cocktail
+route, recognized him; immediately, he was riding shoulder high. His
+bearers broke for the sidewalk, and down Market Street he went, a
+blue-and-gold serpentine dancing behind him. There was his first Jinks
+at the Bohemian club--an impromptu affair, thrown in between the
+revelling Christmas Jinks in the clubhouse and the formally artistic
+Midsummer High Jinks in the Russian River Grove. The Sire, noting his
+smile and figure, impressed him into service for a small part. This
+brought a fortnight of rehearsal which was all play and expression of
+young animal spirits, a night of revel refined by art, an after-jinks
+dinner of the cast, whereat Bertram, as usual, spoke only to conquer.
+Memory held also one perfectly-blended winter house-party at the Banks
+ranch, with the rain swaying the eucalyptus trees outside and a dozen
+people chosen from San Francisco for their power to entertain, making
+two nights and a day cheerful within.
+
+Later in life, he, the unreflective, thought that times had changed
+in his city; that men were not so brilliant nor circles so convivial
+as when he was very young. It was not in him to know that neither
+times nor men had changed; that he thought so only because he looked
+on them no longer through the rose glasses of youth.
+
+He himself would have called it a season of great change, and he would
+have missed, at that, the greatest change of all--the transformation
+in himself. The face on which we saw so little written when he had
+that meeting in the Hotel Marseillaise, the new sheet straight from
+the mills of the gods, had now a faint scratching upon it. The mouth
+was looser in repose, firmer in action; the roving and merry eye was
+more certain, more accurate as it were, in its glances. His youthful
+assurance had changed in him to something like mature self-certainty.
+In those external city manners which he had set about from the
+beginning to acquire, he showed more ease. Although he had lost the
+fragrance of an untouched youth, he had become altogether a prettier
+figure of a man.
+
+He needed all the prodigal youth and the cowboy strength in him to
+keep up his social pace and still do his work, but he managed it.
+Indeed, he became of distinct value to the office through the business
+which he brought in from his wandering and his revelling. It seemed
+that he might refurbish that old law practice and find his way to the
+partnership which Judge Tiffany foresaw at the end of one path.
+
+Through this consideration and through the partisan friendship of Mrs.
+Tiffany, he became gradually a pet and familiar of the Tiffany
+household, taking pot-luck dinners with them, joining them once or
+twice on their out-of-doors excursions. His big, bounding presence,
+his good-natured gambols of the Newfoundland pup order, transformed
+that somewhat serious and faded menage, gave it light and interest,
+as from a baby in the house. Although Mrs. Tiffany mothered him, gave
+him her errands to do, she made no mistake about the centre of
+attraction for him. He was "after" Eleanor. That young woman took him
+soberly and naturally, laughing at his gambols, accepting his
+attentions, but giving no sign to Mrs. Tiffany's attentive eyes that
+her interest was more than indifferent friendship.
+
+His wooing, in fact, went on in a desultory fashion, as though he were
+following the policy which he had expounded to Kate Waddington--"hang
+around and watch." He paid no more compliments to grey eyes; he paid
+no compliments at all. When they were alone, he entertained her with
+those new tales of his associations in the city, which pleased her
+less, had he only known it, than his tales of the ranch and gridiron.
+If he showed the state of his feeling, it was no more than by an
+occasional long and hungry look.
+
+In one way or another, he saw nearly as much of Kate Waddington, that
+winter, as he did of Eleanor. Kate, too, was a ray of light. She--"the
+little sister of the clever" her enemies called her--made the Tiffany
+house a bourne between her stops at her home in the Mission and her
+rangings about Russian Hill. Bertram noticed with sentimental pleasure
+that the two girls were a great deal together. He found them
+exchanging the coin of feminine friendship in Eleanor's living-room,
+he met them on shopping excursions in Post street. When the three met
+so, Kate always sparkled with her best wit, her most cheerful manner;
+but she showed, too, a kind of deference toward Eleanor, an attitude
+which said, "He is yours; I am intruding only by accident." The
+meaning in this attitude bore itself in, at length, even upon Bertram
+Chester; and he did not fail to glow with gratitude. He expressed that
+gratitude once or twice when he was alone with Kate. Somehow, it was
+easy for him to talk to her about such things.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+"Are you off the job to-night?" came the resonant voice of Bertram
+Chester over the telephone.
+
+"Yes!" Eleanor laughed. "Are you coming to play with us?"
+
+"No. You're coming to play with me. One of our best little playmates
+leans over my elbow as I indite these few lines--little Katie. Mark
+Heath is reporting great doings in Chinatown to-night, and he wants
+assistance. Do you suppose your Aunt Mattie will object to
+Chinatown?"
+
+"Aunt Matilda never dictates--"
+
+"Then it's Chinatown! We'll be along for you in half an hour. We're
+dining with the Masters, who have inconsiderately refused to come
+along. What's happened to you?"
+
+"Nothing--why?"
+
+"Your voice sounds so chipper!"
+
+"That shows I'm in a mood to play!"
+
+"Then we'll be along in a _quarter_ of an hour."
+
+"And I'll be waiting at the garden gate!"
+
+The swish and murmur of night, the rustle of a steady sea breeze, the
+composite rumble of the city far below, tuned with the song in
+Eleanor's blood as she stood waiting by the front gate. She looked
+down on the pattern of light and heavy shadow that was the city, and a
+curious mood of exultation came over her. Light foreshadowings of this
+mood had touched her now and again during the past two months; never
+before had these transitory feelings piled themselves up into such a
+definite emotion.
+
+She could not trace its shy beginning, but she was aware of it first
+as a sense of the humanity in the cells of that luminous honeycomb
+below, the struggling, hoping, fighting, aspiring mass, each unit a
+thing to love, did one but know the best. The wave of love universal
+beat so strong on her heart that she turned her eyes away for surfeit
+of rapture, and looked up to the stars. They, the bright angels of
+judgment whose infinite spaces she could not contemplate without fear,
+united themselves in some mysterious bond with the little human
+things below; the sight of them brought the same wave of rapture. Too
+mighty long to be endured, the wave broke into ripples of happy
+contemplation. Sounding lines of forgotten poems ran through her mind,
+movements of old symphonies, memories of her vicarious raptures before
+the altar in the convent, glimpses of hillsides and valleys and woods
+in the winter rain which she had seen unseeing that she might reserve
+their deeper meaning for this deeper sight of the spirit. "I wonder if
+this is not happiness; if Heaven will not be so?" she thought. It
+came, too, that if this exaltation lasted a moment longer, she should
+know with God the meaning of all things, the Reason which united stars
+and space and men and the works of men.
+
+The resonant bass of Bertram Chester, beating down Kate's cheerful
+treble, floated up from the sidewalk. The sound came almost as a
+relief; yet on second thought she was a little sorry for their
+intrusion into this lonely rapture of the spirit. She looked over the
+wall. Kate, revealed in the light of their gate-lamp, walked between
+the two men, who were bending toward her; now they were all laughing
+together. She was radiant, this firm-fleshed, golden flower of the
+West. Eleanor dipped from her clouds of glory to notice that she wore
+a new tailor gown, that every touch of her costume showed how she had
+got herself up for that special occasion. And now the spiritual fluid
+in Eleanor transmuted itself into a reckless gaiety. She slipped down
+the steps and confronted them on the sidewalk.
+
+"Hello," said Kate, looking her over. "Well, who's given you a
+present?"
+
+Eleanor hugged her. "That's just what's happened, Katie. Somebody
+_has_ given me a present--I believe it must have been the stars." She
+extended her hands, right and left, to the men; holding them so, she
+rattled on; "Boys and girls, there's so much ego in my cosmos to-night
+that it's running out at every pore. I'm sure there's going to be a
+party to-night, and I'm sure it's got up for my benefit. I'm going to
+play so hard--so hard that they'll put me to bed crying! Mr. Heath,
+bring on your Chinese and let them gambol and frisk. It's my birthday.
+This isn't the date in the family Bible, as Kate could tell you if
+she weren't a lady, but I'm sure my parents made a mistake. I just
+know that some menial is coming in a minute with a birthday cake--and
+the ring and the thimble and the coin and everything will be in my
+slice--Hello, Bert Chester!"
+
+"Where do I come in?" enquired Kate.
+
+"You? You come in as my dearest little playmate, to whom I sent the
+first invitation."
+
+"I see at a glance," rejoined Mark Heath, "that we've got our work cut
+out for us. I will now announce to the Little Girl who is Having a
+Party the program of games and sports. The festival of the women is on
+in Chinatown."
+
+"I saw it from the car as I passed Dupont Street," chimed in Kate.
+"And the Quarter is blazing like a fire in a tar barrel."
+
+In the most natural manner, Kate linked herself to Mark Heath. She
+always yielded the place beside Bertram when Eleanor was present;
+quite as naturally, she herself took that place when Eleanor was away.
+Bertram cast a long look on his companion; and he ventured for the
+first time in weeks, on something like a compliment.
+
+"What _has_ happened to you? You look--hanged if I can just tell you
+how you look, but it's great!"
+
+"Oh, compliment me! I love compliments! That's my birthday present
+from you. I wonder if the Chinese babies will be out on the
+street--the little, golden babies. Why haven't they a legend about
+those babies? Mr. Heath, do you know Chinese mythology? Kate, aren't
+you sure those children are primroses transformed by the fairies to
+hide them from the goblins?"
+
+Bertram frowned a little as she drew the other couple into their
+private conversation. But he continued to study her. This lightness
+and brightness which she had developed so suddenly, seemed quite to
+dim the radiance of his own personality. He fell into a quiet which
+lasted far into the evening. She, on her side, moved like one
+intoxicated by some divine liquor. Never had she seemed so gay, so
+young; and--though he did not wholly formulate this--never had she
+seemed to him so inaccessible.
+
+They approached a dark alley beside an Italian tenement. Eleanor,
+dancing around the corner, came upon it suddenly. She drew up.
+
+"There's an ogre in this dark den--I know there is. I must see him!
+Just think, I'm ten years old going onto eleven, and I never yet saw a
+real ogre. Come on--we're going ogre hunting!" She plunged into the
+shadows. Mark, laughing, followed.
+
+Eleanor peeped into the door of a wine-house, peeped over a board
+fence, and came back to announce:
+
+"He's not in. I left my card--oh, there he is--he's visiting the
+goblin in that garden across the street!" She skipped across to an old
+stone wall which held its half-acre of earth suspended over the
+hill-fall. Mark skipped with her; Bertram followed at a distance as
+one who plays a game of which he is not sure. Eleanor brought up
+against the wall.
+
+"There he is--by the kitchen door. Of course you see him! Good, Kind
+ogre, you don't eat little girls on their birthdays do you?"
+
+"Aren't his red eyes beautiful and hasn't he a classy set of teeth?"
+rejoined Mark Heath. "Be good, Fido, and you shall have a plumber for
+breakfast."
+
+"But he'll spare me! He says I'm too beautiful to eat!" Eleanor was
+dancing back. "Oh Kate, I've seen an ogre!"
+
+Kate did not answer. She fell in with Mark Heath, and as they drew
+ahead she murmured:
+
+"I wonder what's got into her?"
+
+"Nothing I guess. I should rather say she'd got out. I think it's
+bully."
+
+"Oh, yes," said Kate, drawing out the last word.
+
+They turned into the Quarter at Washington Street, and at once they
+were in the midst of the festival. From a doorway burst a group of
+little, immobile-featured Cantonese women, all in soft greens, deep
+blues, reds and golds that glimmered in the gas-lights. Banded combs
+in jade and gold held their smooth, glossy black hair; their slender
+hands, peeping from their sleeves, shone with rings. The foremost
+among them, a doll-girl of sixteen or so, tottered and swayed on the
+lily feet of a lady. The rest walked upon clattering pattens, like a
+French heel set by the cobbler's mistake at the instep.
+
+Mark Heath, the young reporter, proud in his knowledge of "the
+inside," took up the reins of conversation.
+
+"A fairy story for you right at the start, birthday lady! That
+little-foot girl is the daughter of Hom Kip. You remember the story,
+don't you? The old plug tried to sell this daughter of his for wife to
+a merchant in Portland. She had her own ideas--she eloped with the
+second tragedian from the theatre over there. Hom Kip put detectives
+on them, and caught her at Fresno. But she'd already married her actor
+American fashion; and the Portland bridegroom is waiting until father
+makes his little blossom a widow."
+
+"As temporary Empress of Chinatown, I order that he shall do nothing
+of the kind," said Eleanor.
+
+"As your grand vizier, I shall put the machinery in motion that will
+free the beautiful young bride," rejoined Mark Heath.
+
+Kate broke in.
+
+"What became of the actor? I'm one of those dull persons who always
+wants the rest of the story!"
+
+"I told you, didn't I, that father is going to make her a widow? At
+least he was until the Empress ordered otherwise. The actor has
+probably abandoned his art, which gives him undesirable publicity. And
+some day, if father dares disobey the Empress, there'll be a
+mysterious murder in a backwoods laundry--police baffled."
+
+Eleanor contemplated the lily-foot girl, swaying about the corner into
+Dupont, her little handkerchief in one hand, her proper fan in the
+other.
+
+"Poor little blossom--I wonder if she'll mourn for him? Faithful Grand
+Vizier, don't tell me sad facts on my birthday night. I want only
+pretty things."
+
+"Whether she'll mourn or not won't make much difference to father--or
+to the Highbinders. Je-hoshaphat--look!"
+
+For they had turned the corner into Dupont Street, main avenue of the
+Quarter. Its narrow vista came upon them at first as a smothered
+flame. Innumerable paper lanterns, from scarlet globes as big as a
+barrel to parti-colored cones that one might hold in his palm, blazed
+everywhere, making strange combinations, incredible shades, in the
+flaring Chinese signs, the bright dresses of the women. The sidewalks
+quivered with life--soberly dressed coolies, making green background
+for the gauds of their women, bespangled babies late out of bed that
+they might gain good luck and blessing from those rites, priests in
+white robes, dignitaries in long tunics, incongruous Caucasian
+tourists and spectators.
+
+A moment Eleanor drank it all in; then she addressed her Grand
+Vizier.
+
+"Inform my people, through your invaluable publication, that their
+demonstration in my honor is perfect."
+
+"It shall be done, liege lady--three column spread on the front page.
+Oh, you've got to have a shoe." For a vendor was bearing down on them,
+carrying a tray of pink paper shoes like valentines. "That's the
+symbol of this festival--the goddess lost her shoe before she died.
+How much, Charlie? Two bits two? All light! Empress, permit me to
+present this souvenir of a grateful people. Miss Waddington, have a
+shoe on me!"
+
+Eleanor hung the pink trifle to the pin at her throat.
+
+"I shall add it to the royal treasure trove," she said. It came across
+her then, as one of the unrelated thoughts and fancies which were
+coursing in such swarms through her mind, that Bertram Chester, though
+he stuck close to her side, had been unusually silent. She drew him in
+at once.
+
+"Does it become me?" she asked.
+
+"Everything becomes you."
+
+"You don't say anything about _my_ shoes!" said Kate.
+
+Now the crowd began to eddy and to whirl toward the next corner. There
+rose the clang of gongs, the shrilling of a Chinese pipe playing a
+mournful air in that five-toned scale Whose combinations suggest
+always the mystery of the East. About that corner swept the procession
+of the Good Lady, priests before, women worshippers behind. The
+priests set up a falsetto chant, the banner-bearers lifted their
+staves, and the parti-colored mass moved down on them.
+
+"It's like a flower-bed on a landslide!" exclaimed Eleanor.
+
+Mark Heath gravely pulled out his left cuff and took rapid notes with
+a pencil.
+
+"That goes into the story--anything more up your sleeve like that?"
+
+"Wasn't it good? Eleanor is always thinking up clever things to say,"
+Kate came in. Her voice was rather flat.
+
+At the edge of the gutter where they stood, a Chinese shoemaker had
+set out on a lacquer tray his offering to the gods. Red candles
+bordered it, surrounding little bowls of rice and sweetmeats, a slice
+of roast pig, a Chinese lily. As the banners approached, certain
+devout coolies found room on the sidewalk to prostrate themselves.
+Eleanor, absorbed now in a poetic appreciation of all this glory of
+color and spirit, felt a movement beside her. She looked down. The
+shoemaker was flat on his forehead beside his offering.
+
+"Would you per-ceive that Chink grovel," spoke the voice of Bertram
+Chester.
+
+Before Eleanor could turn on him, he was addressing the shoemaker.
+
+"Feel a heap better, Charlie? Say, who-somalla you? Brush off your
+knees!" The Chinese, if he understood, paid no more attention than he
+paid to the lamp post in his path. Gathering up his offering, he
+pushed his way back through the crowd.
+
+For the first time that evening, Eleanor became somewhat like her
+normal self as she said:
+
+"Why, this is a religious ceremony, isn't it--all this light and
+color!"
+
+"Yes," responded the personal conductor of the party, "but you have to
+pinch yourself to remember it. For instance, you'll be charmed to
+know that I saw one of those priests, up in front there, arrested last
+week in a raid on a gambling joint. Morals haven't an awful lot to do
+with this religion. Maybe that fellow on the pavement was praying that
+he'd have a chance to murder his dearest enemy, and maybe he was
+applying for luck in a lottery. Empress of Chinatown, up yon frazzled
+flight of stairs lurks the New York Daytime Lottery. The agents of
+said lottery are playing ducks and drakes right now with the pay of
+the printers on the imperial bulletin which I have the honor to
+represent. Some day, your grand vizier and most humble servant is
+going to do a Sunday story on a drawing in a Chinese lottery."
+
+Eleanor showed no inclination to go on with the game.
+
+"Have another shoe--one shoe, Charlie, for the little princess!"
+continued Mark Heath. This one, displayed amid the cone-sticks and New
+Years nuts of a sweetmeat stand, was bright blue. Mark hung it on
+Eleanor's shoulder; then, as a kind of afterthought, he bought a
+crimson tassel for Kate.
+
+The procession was past, was breaking up. The women, in knots of three
+or four, were scattering to the night's festivities. Mark, as guide,
+let business go as he led them on his grand tour of Chinatown. They
+stopped to survey sidewalk altars of rice paper and jade, where
+priests tapped their little gongs and sang all night the glory of the
+Good Lady; they visited the prayer store, emporium for red candles,
+"devil-go-ways," punks, votive tassels, and all other Chinese devices
+to win favor of the gods and surcease from demons; they explored the
+cavernous underground dwellings beneath the Jackson Street Theatre;
+they climbed a narrow, reeking passage to marvel at the revel of color
+and riot of strange scent which was the big joss house. Bertram's
+spirits were rising by this time; he expressed them by certain
+cub-like gambols which showed both his failure to appreciate the
+beauty in all this strangeness and his old-time Californian contempt
+for the Chinese as a people. Once he tweaked a cue in passing and
+laughed in the face of the insulted Chinaman; and once he made
+pretence of stealing nuts from a sweetmeat stall.
+
+Wherever Mark found a new design in toy shoes, he bought one for
+Eleanor, until she wore a string of them, like a necklace, across her
+bodice. Yet had the illumination gone a little out of her; she replied
+with diminishing vivacity to Mark's advances as he played the birthday
+game.
+
+When they mounted the joss house stairs she lagged behind; and Bertram
+lagged with her.
+
+"What's the matter?" he asked. "I never saw you so bright and chipper
+as we were awhile ago, and now--say, what's the matter?"
+
+"Nothing. Oh, Mr. Heath--" she raised her voice, "are the actors
+allowed in the joss house--and if not will you have it fixed for me?"
+
+After they had presented their votive punks to the great high god,
+Kate announced that she was footweary.
+
+"Can't we find a place to sit down?" she asked. Mark took her up.
+
+"That's the signal for tea at the Man Far Low restaurant. Ever been
+there? Tea store below, fantan next floor, restaurant top side all the
+way through the block. Come on, Empress of Chinatown. The royal board
+awaits."
+
+The Man Far Low was in the throes of large preparation for the Chinese
+all-night banquets which would close the festival. The cashier wore
+his dress tunic, his cap with the red button. The kitchen door, open
+on the second landing, gave forth a cloud of steam which bore odors of
+peanut oil, duck, bamboo sprouts and Chinese garlic; through the cloud
+they could see cooks working mightily over their brass pots. Every
+compartment of the big dining hall upstairs held its prepared table;
+waiters in new-starched white coats were setting forth a thousand toy
+devices in porcelain. Though the Chinese feasting had not yet
+commenced, it was plain, from the attitude of the waiters, that
+slummers and tourists were not wanted on that night. But still the
+head waiter, when he came slipping over on his felt shoes, led them to
+a table in the Eastern dining room, from whose balconies one
+overlooked Portsmouth Square. His aspect, however, was anything but
+cheerful.
+
+"Say, you Chink, smile!" said Bertram as he seated himself.
+
+By a slight turn of the head, the very slightest in the world, the
+Chinese showed that he caught this in all its force. But he went
+gravely on, setting out porcelain bowls. Eleanor's hand moved a
+little, as though in restraint.
+
+"Cheer up, Charlie, crops is ripe!" resumed Bertram.
+
+"Don't--please," cried Eleanor. The first word came short, sharp and
+peremptory; the "please" was appealing.
+
+The color rose under Bertram's brown skin. Kate, an outside party to
+this passage, smiled a quiet smile; but she spoke to Mark Heath.
+
+"What _are_ those paintings on that screen--come and tell me about
+them!"
+
+Now Bertram and Eleanor stood alone with the table between them.
+
+"I was jollying him!" burst out Bertram. Eleanor glanced at Kate, who
+stood profile-on listening to the ready Heath.
+
+"Shall we go out on the balcony?" She stepped through the open French
+window.
+
+As they stood in the shadow, the city at their feet, neither spoke for
+a moment. Finally,
+
+"It's a call-down, I suppose?" began Bertram, tentatively.
+
+"Not necessarily."
+
+With a slam, he brought his hand down on the balcony rail.
+
+"You don't give--you don't give a damn--that's the trouble with
+you--you don't care what I do!"
+
+Eleanor drew a little away from him before she answered:
+
+"I care if anyone is uncivil."
+
+"What is it but a Chink? They expect it! Why, down in Tulare--" His
+voice fell away as though he recognized the futility of an attack in
+this form. She spoke:
+
+"It is you who should not expect it." And then, "I am sorry I said
+what I did. It was an impulse. We are all imperfect. I've often been
+unkind myself."
+
+Bertram stood gripping the rail before him as one caught and held by a
+new emotion. When he spoke, his voice was low and rather hard. At the
+first tone of it, she shrank from the daimon in him.
+
+"If you only cared enough to call me down! That's the trouble with
+you. Am I--am I the dirt under your feet?"
+
+"Oh, don't please!" But he was going on, too fast to be stopped.
+
+"I'm afraid of you--that's what's the matter. What have you got in you
+that I can't seem to melt? You kept away from me the first time ever
+I saw you. You've kept away ever since. You don't think I'm as good as
+you--and I'm not. But it's aggravating--it's damned aggravating--to
+have you rub it in. You've got something about you that I can't touch
+anywhere." And he paused, as though expecting her to deny it.
+
+"I don't know what right you have to say this," she exclaimed.
+
+In her swift rush to her own defence, she had dropped her guard. She
+realized it on the moment, heard his inevitable reply before he opened
+his mouth to the swift-flashing answer which, that outer self told
+her, was the only possible answer for him to make.
+
+"Only this right. I'm in love with you. I've been in love with you
+ever since I saw you down at the Judge's ranch, only I didn't know it
+then. I love you." Silence for a moment, and then, "I love you!"
+
+For just one instant, it seemed to her that she was swaying toward him
+in spite of herself. He made, curiously, no active motion toward her.
+That outer self of Eleanor's, reigning as always over her conscious
+self, commenting, criticising, seeing--that outer self remembered,
+above her mental turmoil, that never in all their later acquaintance
+had he tried even to touch her finger.
+
+"Oh, don't!" she cried, "please don't!"
+
+He made a growl in his throat, the adult counterpart to a baby's cry
+of disappointment.
+
+"Didn't I tell you?" he said, "and now I've laid myself wide open for
+a throw-down."
+
+"If you call it that. Oh Bertram--" he and she both noticed the shift
+to his familiar name--"I'm afraid I haven't been fair to you. Oh, have
+I been fair?"
+
+He paused as though considering a whole new range of ideas.
+
+"Yes, I guess you have," he responded at length.
+
+"You're a man," she said, "and a big man. I suppose I ought--to love
+you. To have the power of loving you in me. And oh, there have been
+moments when I thought I could." She stopped as though appalled by the
+lengths to which she had gone. "You see, I'm trying to be fair now.
+I'm telling you everything."
+
+And then, with the thought which succeeded, it was as though she felt
+the physical tingle of bay leaves in her nostrils, "or nearly
+everything."
+
+Through the open French windows came the cheery voice of Kate
+Waddington.
+
+"Tea is served, ladies and gentlemen!"
+
+"All right--be along presently!" called Bertram. And then to Eleanor:
+
+"You must tell me--you can't keep me hanging by the toes until I see
+you again."
+
+"The rest means--since I am being perfectly fair to you--that I can't
+tell." Now something like strong emotion touched her voice--"Don't
+think I am coquetting with you--don't believe that it is anything but
+my effort to be fair." She turned on this, and stepped through the
+open window.
+
+Bertram struggling to compose his face, Eleanor wearing her old air of
+sweet inscrutability, they faced the quick, perceiving glance of Kate
+Waddington who sat pouring tea from the crack between two shell
+bowls.
+
+Eleanor settled herself on the teak-wood stool.
+
+"You _must_ come out on the balcony before we go," she cried. "I never
+saw the city lights so wonderful."
+
+"Well," said Kate, "it all depends on the company!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Kate's plump and inert mother, who always regarded this daughter of
+hers somewhat as a cuckoo in the nest, was in a complaining mood this
+morning. She sat in her dressing-gown embroidering peonies on a
+lambrequin and aired her grievances. Kate, writing notes at the
+old-fashioned black walnut writing desk, looked up at the climaxes of
+her mother's address, bit her pen and frowned over her shoulder. For
+the greater part of the time, however, Mrs. Waddington spoke to empty
+air.
+
+"I never did see such a daughter," said Mrs. Waddington, jabbing with
+her scissors at a loose end of pink silk. "As if it isn't enough,
+gallivanting around the way you do, fairly living in other people's
+houses, never bringing any company home, but you can't even be
+decently civil when you _are_ at home. We might just as well be a
+hotel for all the respect you pay us. What are you doing when you're
+away, I'd like to know? It's all well enough, the stories you tell--"
+Kate, resting between notes, saw fit to parry this last thrust.
+
+"I've always supposed I was capable of taking care of myself," she
+said. "At any rate, you've let me proceed on that theory."
+
+It needed only the slightest flutter of an opponent's rapier to throw
+Mrs. Waddington on the defensive.
+
+"You never let me," she mourned. "Goodness knows, I gave you every
+chance to take me along. When first you began going with those painter
+people, you might have counted me in."
+
+"You didn't seem eager, perceptibly, until I had made my own way,"
+Kate vouchsafed. At that moment the telephone rang.
+
+While Kate was in the house, no one else thought of answering the
+telephone. Mrs. Waddington would have been the last to usurp the
+prerogative. For that instrument was the tap root of her spy system
+over her daughter. By it, she picked up things; learned what this
+irresponsible responsibility of hers was doing. Mrs. Waddington had
+her mental lists of Kate's telephonic friends. She imagined that she
+could tell, by the tone of her daughter's voice, just who was on the
+other end of the line.
+
+"Oh, Bert Chester!" came Kate's voice from the hall. Mrs. Waddington
+made note number one. This mention of the name was significant. The
+discreet Kate, who knew her mother's habits, hardly ever called names
+over the wire.
+
+A pause for a very short reply, and then:
+
+"Certainly. Zinkand at one. I'm beginning to think it's time I worked
+at my job as confidant. What is the use of a confidant if you don't
+confide?"
+
+Mrs. Waddington leaned forward while Kate got her reply. The mother in
+her, unsensitized though as it was, noted the sparkle in Kate's voice.
+But for the intervening door, she might have seen a great deal more
+sparkle in Kate's face, down-turned to listen.
+
+"Oh yes, I was aware of that!" Kate's voice went on. "Dolt! Did I
+catch it? You're a poor dissembler. You're too honest. You might tell
+the verdict before I tell you--"
+
+Mrs. Waddington could stand it no longer. It was so uncommon for her
+daughter to speak thus freely and emotionally at the telephone, that
+she must have a look. She rose, therefore, and crossed past the open
+hall door. She noticed a certain tension in her daughter's face as she
+bent her head to await the reply.
+
+"You poor, perplexed boy!" went on Kate's purring, caressing voice,
+"Then you need a confidant. Zinkand's at one--and I'll look my
+prettiest to draw you out!"
+
+Mrs. Waddington, when her daughter was come back into the room,
+renewed her plaint:
+
+"I wish you'd save for your parents a little of the graciousness you
+give your friends," she said. "I wouldn't mind so much if you were
+getting somewhere. But here you are, nearly twenty-four years old and
+goodness knows if you've had a young man, I don't hear about it. How
+can a respectable young man want to marry a girl like you, I'd like to
+know? Those they play with, they don't marry."
+
+Kate's mood had changed completely. She advanced now with the
+prettiest caressing gesture in the world, threw one arm across the
+wrinkled skin and old lace of her mother's throat. Mrs. Waddington
+resisted for a moment, her head turned away; then, gradually, she let
+her being lap itself in this quieter air. Her head settled down on
+Kate's shoulder.
+
+"Perhaps," said Kate, "I may."
+
+"Well I wish you'd hurry up about it," said Mrs. Waddington. "Girls
+will be girls, I suppose, and they've got to learn for themselves.
+There, there--you're mussing my work."
+
+Kate dropped a kiss on her mother's forehead and vanished up the
+stairs.
+
+Bert Chester, waiting before Zinkand's an hour later, picked her a
+block away from the nooning crowd. Before he recognized the
+olive-green tailor suit which he had come to know, he noticed the firm
+yet gracile move of her. As she came nearer, he was aware of two
+loungers waiting, like himself, to keep appointments. He caught this
+exchange from them:
+
+"Who? The girl in a kind of brownish green?"
+
+"Yes. Isn't she a peach?"
+
+Just then, it seemed to him, did the purely physical charm of her
+burst upon him for the first time. Supple and swaying, yet plump and
+round; her head set square with some of a man's strength, on
+exquisitely sloping shoulders: and the taste--he would have called it
+so--of her dress! A discriminating woman might have noticed that her
+costume bordered on ostentatious unostentation. For it was designed
+in every detail to frame the picture, to set off not only that figure
+but also the cream of her skin, the tawny hair, even those firm, plump
+hands.
+
+He found himself remembering that he had just proposed to another
+girl. The thought flashed in, and flashed out as quickly.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Cafe Zinkand formed, at the time, a social nodule in the
+metropolitan parish that San Francisco was. As the Palace Hotel was
+its Rialto, gathering-place for prosperous adventure, so the Zinkand
+was its bourne. In this mahoganied and mirrored restaurant with its
+generous fare, its atmosphere of comfortable extravagance, those who
+made the city go, who gave its peculiar Saxon-Latin move and glitter,
+were accustomed to gather and gossip. It blazed with special splendor
+on the nights when this or that "Eastern attraction" showed at the
+Columbia Theatre. To stand on such evenings at the Powell Street
+terminus, to watch those tripping, gaily-dressed, laughing Californian
+women thronging the belt of city light from the theatre canopy to the
+restaurant canopy--ah, that was San Francisco! Not Paris, not Buenos
+Ayres--they say who have travelled far--could show such a procession
+of Dianaides, such a Greek festival of joy in the smooth, vigorous
+body and the things which feed and clothe it. With that absence of
+public conventionality which was another ear-mark of the old city, all
+sorts and conditions of men and women sat side by side at the tables.
+Harlots, or those who might well pass as such, beside the best morale
+there is in women; daughters of washerwomen beside daughters of such
+proud blood as we have; bookmakers' wives, blazing with the jewels
+which will be pawned to-morrow, beside German housewives on a Saturday
+night revel; jockies and touts from the race tracks beside roistering
+students from Stanford and Berkeley; soldiers of fortune blown in by
+the Pacific winds, taking their first intoxicating taste of
+civilization after their play with death and wealth, beside stodgy
+burghers grown rich in real estate; clerks beside magnates--all united
+in the worship of the body.
+
+At noon, however, its workaday aspect was on; it was no more than a
+lunching place. Chester and Kate found seats in a retired corner.
+
+She looked him over with cool mischief while she drew off her gloves
+and let one white hand, still creased in pink with the pressure of the
+seams, drop toward him on the table.
+
+"I am not exactly to congratulate you," she said, "but for a man who
+was turned down last night you don't seem exactly unhappy."
+
+Bertram let several expressions chase themselves over his face before
+he blurted out:
+
+"What's the matter with me?"
+
+"Not a great deal. Has she so refused you as to make you conscious of
+sin?"
+
+"It wasn't a cold turn-down. I'd like it better if it was. I'd have
+something to go on. It's--it's like trying to bite into a billiard
+ball. I--you know what I mean."
+
+"You mean that she holds herself above you--that she feels superior to
+you?"
+
+Bertram arrested all motion on that word, sat with the menu card,
+which he had been twirling, immovable between his hands.
+
+"Yes. If you want to jolt it to me good and hard that way. I guess
+that is what it does mean."
+
+"I suppose then that the crisis--last night--came about from your
+little passage with the Chinese waiter? It happened while you were
+out on the balcony didn't it?"
+
+Bertram stared and glowed.
+
+"Say, you're a wonder. You reach out and get things before they come
+to you at all. That's just what did happen."
+
+"And then? Or pardon me, I don't want you to tell me any more than
+it's right for you to tell--any more than you feel like telling."
+
+"Oh that's all right. Well, when we got outside it was the same old
+song. She didn't care enough even to call me down. And like a fool I
+came out with it. What's the use of telling what she said or what I
+said? It was just the same way. She kept me dancing. She wouldn't say
+yes and she wouldn't say no. She seemed anxious about only one thing.
+She wanted to know if she'd been fair to me."
+
+"I suppose she has--!" Kate brought this out as though he had put a
+question to her. "And you want to know what I think?"
+
+"I sure do."
+
+"I think she cares--at least a little--shall I tell you all?"
+
+Bertram, even in the hottest of this conversation, did not forget the
+needs of his body. The waiter stood at his elbow. He rushed through
+the order, and continued:
+
+"I want to know everything."
+
+"Well, to begin with--Bert Chester, you're a man."
+
+"I didn't ask for hot air."
+
+"That's all of that. You're an unfinished man. You--haven't had the
+chance to get all the refinements which people like Eleanor Gray have
+acquired. Do you see now? You've made it--you've been making it--all
+for yourself. You had no fortune. It's splendid the way you worked to
+get all these things. I know the story of how you got through college.
+Everyone who knows you is proud of that. But--well Eleanor's mother
+was rich and proud before she married, and her grandparents were
+richer and prouder. Then she's lived a great deal alone; and she never
+really blossomed out until she went abroad. So she learned her social
+ways from Europeans. She's got a lot of British and Continental
+ideas.
+
+"With the rest of us, you know, it doesn't make any difference. You
+could perceive that by the way we've taken you in. Why, it's really a
+part of you. You're only two years out of college, hardly that; and
+you're still studying law; but think how people have taken you up! It
+is simply that Eleanor looks at it in a different way. It's a pretty
+peculiarity in one of the sweetest girls I know."
+
+Kate paused. Bert made no move to answer. She went on:
+
+"Now about the thing you can't grasp in Eleanor. It's this way. You
+can't see her nature as another _girl_ can. She's just as sweet and
+tender and delicate as she can be, and she has high ideals--that's one
+result of her living away from the world. If she were a little warmer
+in temperament, it might be different, but--" Kate paused here as
+though pondering whether to reveal or to conceal the thought of her
+mind.
+
+"But of course it is the coldness of a diamond or a sapphire or
+something else very pure and precious."
+
+Bertram Chester pulled himself up at this point and plucked at a place
+away back in the conversation.
+
+"What are these things that I don't know? Where is it that I fall
+down?"
+
+"They are some of the finer points."
+
+"Well tell me." Kate noticed that the color had risen in his cheeks
+and that his eyes drooped from hers.
+
+"They must be corrected as we go on--provided you'll let me correct
+them."
+
+"That's what I am asking for--but I'd blame well like an example."
+
+"Well, now, we'll take that waiter episode. The kind of people she'd
+like to know treat servants impersonally. Servants are just
+conveniences to them, like dumb waiters. So of course,--even if it was
+only a Chinaman--she didn't like your noticing him and she came out of
+her shell for just a moment to say so. Do you see now?"
+
+Bertram's dark complexion reddened with the rush of his shame.
+
+"Oh, that's the idea is it? I thought from something she said that she
+was afraid I'd hurt his feelings. She wants me to put more front on
+before 'em, does she?"
+
+"Just about that. She doesn't like to see you put yourself on a level
+with them."
+
+"All right, that was straight over the plate and I got it."
+
+Again Kate reached over to pat his hand.
+
+"Now don't take it seriously; I know--she herself must know--how
+splendid and able and promising you are--how much of a man!"
+
+Bert spoke in some irritation.
+
+"I always knew I wasn't a gentleman," he said, "but this is the first
+time it was ever shot straight at me that way."
+
+"Bert Chester, as long as I'm a friend of yours don't you ever dare
+say to me that you're not a gentleman. You're one of the biggest and
+strongest gentlemen I ever knew. Anyone need only see you for five
+minutes to know you're that. But some people have certain things which
+they attribute to a gentleman--notions, as I've said. And Eleanor from
+her European experiences has some of these notions. Don't you see?"
+
+The smile, which always broke so suddenly, came back to Bert Chester's
+face.
+
+"Well, of course that's why I broke loose from the ranch and went to
+college in the first place. I wanted to be as good, every way, as the
+best there is!"
+
+"And you are already!"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"No, or this wouldn't have happened. I want to be good enough to marry
+any girl, no matter who. I'm going to amount to something. I'm going
+to be rich, too--and a darn sight quicker than most people know. I
+don't know that we came here to talk about that, though."
+
+"Please go on. We came here to talk about you--anything about
+yourself."
+
+"That part of it has something to do with the main issue. I'm going to
+pull out from Judge Tiffany as soon as I go up against the bar
+examinations next month. At least, I want to pull out, and I'm only
+wondering how the Judge will take it and how she will take it. You
+see, I might just as well get admitted, and then it is good-bye to law
+for me afterwards unless I use it in politics. Law--" Bertram rammed
+his finger on the table with each word that followed "law is too blame
+slow. Anyone could see that I couldn't be chasing about as I'm doing
+if I had to depend on what Judge Tiffany is paying me as a clerk. Why,
+I've made twice as much already whirling at business. I'll always have
+my admission to the bar, too. If I want to settle down on a law
+practice after I get rich, I can do it."
+
+"That seems very promising to me."
+
+"But here's the question. Is the Judge going to take it for a
+throw-down, and how is Eleanor going to like the program?"
+
+Kate appeared to be considering. In fact, she was considering a great
+many more things than Bertram knew.
+
+"I'm pretty sure Eleanor wouldn't care," she said at length. "Hers
+isn't a very practical mind. It's impossible to say about Judge
+Tiffany. He's crotchety. The right's on your side, for a man has a
+right to change his employment, hasn't he? And I'm sure you have more
+than returned your little salary. On the whole, I don't know but it
+would be better for you with Eleanor if the Judge did get angry with
+you. A girl with ideals like hers rather likes to have a man
+persecuted. And you can't let it stand in the way of your career."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Oh, it isn't as though it were a choice between the girl and the
+career. It isn't at all. The best way to win her is to build yourself
+up to the big, splendid man she'd like you to be. If you stay a little
+law clerk for five years or so, you won't have much inducement to
+offer her! When you consider marriage, you have to remember that a
+girl like Eleanor can't live on a trifle. I'd follow my own career. It
+isn't, you see, as though there were anyone else in the field. Other
+men come to the house, of course--men she's met at the Masters, old
+friends of the family--but I don't consider any of them as rivals. I
+did think for a time that Ned Greene was attracted, but he's crazy now
+over Katherine Herbert. So it isn't a case for immediate action."
+
+"Do you think--have you ever heard her speak of me?"
+
+Kate's answer came readily.
+
+"She has spoken to me of you--the way women do, so that you see under
+what they say. We women are devils"--she smiled--"no, I can't tell you
+what she said. I'm in a peculiar position about it. You see, her talk,
+as it happens, is all twisted up in a confidence she made to
+me--something else in her life--nothing to do with you--and I can't
+break it. But I can do something without breaking any confidence. I
+can tell you what I think you ought to do."
+
+"Well, I guess that's what I want--" with the air of one who would
+have liked a great deal more.
+
+"The man who gets Eleanor Gray--and especially if Bertram Chester is
+the man--cannot take her by assault. If you reach out to grasp
+her--you who are so strong--it will only break something in that
+delicate nature of hers. Don't woo. Serve. Don't even see her too
+often. Don't renew that scene on the balcony--never make that mistake
+again. When you are with her, show by your attitude how you feel, and
+show her--well, that you're learning the things you've asked me to
+teach you--the things I'm going to teach you."
+
+"It's sure a pink tea program," said Bertram. Kate laughed.
+
+"Bert Chester, when you make your dying speech from the scaffold
+you're going to say something original and funny. You can't help it.
+Now can you?"
+
+The smile broke again on Bertram's face.
+
+"Well, it has its funny side," he admitted. "All right. If
+refinement's the game, me to it." His smile had caught Kate's laugh,
+and there came between them a kind of mental click. Soft gratitude
+sprang into his heart and quivered on his lips.
+
+"You're a bully girl! I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have you to
+talk it over with. And you really do understand lots about women and
+those things--where did you learn it?"
+
+The smile went out of Kate. She drooped her eyes and let her pink
+nails flutter on the tablecloth.
+
+"Suffering and experience, I suppose."
+
+"Could I--would you tell me about it?"
+
+She looked up with an air of sweet sincerity.
+
+"I should like very much to tell you. You could help me as much as you
+say I'm helping you. Some other time, we'll have that all out
+together. You see, when one has held a thing in her heart for a long
+time--well, it's a struggle at first to get it out. But sometime when
+I'm in the mood!"
+
+And then he discovered that an appointment at the office was overdue.
+While they went through the formalities of checks and wraps, she
+talked foolish nothings. He parted with her hurriedly to run after a
+Market Street cable car.
+
+"We're going to be the best chums in the world," he said as he shook
+hands.
+
+"Indeed we are!"
+
+She watched him as he ran after the car, swung on the platform with
+the easy economy of motion which belongs to the athlete. But just
+before he set his foot on the platform and looked back at her, she
+herself whirled and started down the street, so that he saw only her
+trim back-figure, the glint of her bronze hair, the easy grace of her
+walk.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+So Bertram Chester went on, the easy familiar of the Tiffany
+establishment, the contriver of Mrs. Tiffany's household assistances,
+and the devoted follower of Eleanor. He never referred in any way to
+the scene on the restaurant balcony; he did nothing formally to press
+his suit. Indeed, his occasional air of gentle diffidence puzzled and
+amused her. She had a queer sense, when she beheld him so, that she
+liked it in him less than some of his old uncouthness, and only a
+trifle better than such roughness of the heart as that passage with
+the Chinese waiter. This new attitude was loose in the back, tight
+across the shoulders, short in the seams--it was not made to fit
+Bertram Chester. When he launched out into rudimentary art criticism,
+stringing together the stock slang which he had picked up in the
+studios, when he tried to impress her with his refined acquaintance,
+his progress toward "society" of the conventional kind, her amusement
+took another turn in the circle of emotion, and became annoyance.
+
+In general company, he reverted to type. At their home dinners, when
+wine and good fare had lit the fires of his animal spirits, he still
+told his rambling, half-boastful stories of the cow country and of
+College times, or laid before these home-stayers the gossip of the
+town. That manner of his, always more compelling than either his
+substance or his words, carried the plainest story; and he had at
+least the art of brevity. One laughed when he laughed, catching from
+his spirit the humorous idea, even when its expression failed on the
+tongue. Voice and gesture and an inner appreciation which he could
+flash instantly to his tongue contributed to these dazzling effects.
+His new-made friends of the artistic set used to tell him, "If you
+could only write down your stories--what humor, what action!" Mark
+Heath, with the information of a room mate, the judging eye of a
+half-disillusionized friend and the cynicism of a young journalist,
+was first to perceive that a stenographer concealed to transcribe his
+talk would get only barren words.
+
+In his fading and declining years, Judge Tiffany leaned more and more
+upon Eleanor, his business partner. Now it had come spring. The trees
+were in bud along the Santa Clara. They must begin preparing for the
+season. The family did not move to the ranch until apricot picking was
+afoot; but from now on either Judge Tiffany or Eleanor would run down
+every week to watch the trees and to oversee the Olsen preparations
+for harvest time. Purchase of supplies and the business of selling
+last year's stock, held over for a rise in German prices, kept Eleanor
+busy.
+
+She dragged the Judge out of his library one March afternoon, that he
+might inspect with her a new set of sprayers which she was
+considering. The Judge went to his office all too seldom nowadays;
+Eleanor and Mrs. Tiffany used continually all kinds of diplomacies to
+keep him at his business, from which he stubbornly refused to retire.
+When they had driven their bargain, Eleanor guided and wheedled him to
+the office. The methodical Attwood, having his man there, thumped a
+pile of papers down before the Judge, representing that this demurrer
+must be in on Tuesday, that case tried or continued next week. The
+Judge sighed as he pulled the papers toward him.
+
+"They've nailed me, Nell," he said. "Here, I'll appoint a substitute.
+Send for Mr. Chester, Attwood--dining anywhere, Chester? Then take pot
+luck with us and pay me by escorting my business conscience home. I'll
+overwork myself if someone doesn't carry her away!"
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+The afternoon fog, forerunner of another rain, floated in lances above
+Montgomery Street. The interior valleys had felt their first touch of
+baking summer, had issued their first call on their cooling plant--the
+Golden Gate, funnel for mist and rain-winds. The moisture fell in
+sleety drops; yet only the stranger and pilgrim took protection of
+raincoat or umbrella. The native knew well enough that it would go no
+further. On these afternoons, neither cold nor hot, wet nor wholly
+dry, the blood is champagne and the heart a dancing-floor.
+
+At the moment when Eleanor stepped out into the home-going crowd, she,
+an instrument tuned to catch delicate vibrations from earth and sea
+and air, felt all this exhilaration. Life was right; the future was
+right; the display of a young female creature before the male--that
+most of all was right. And Bertram Chester, talking for the moment
+like his old, natural self, was a main eddy in the currents of
+joy-in-youth.
+
+"You are bonny to-day!" she said quite naturally as she looked him
+over.
+
+He blushed happily. And the blush helped restore him in her eyes as
+the natural Bertram Chester.
+
+"And you're the bonniest of the bonny. I never saw you look so full of
+ginger except--" he hesitated there, and her words rushed in to meet
+the emergency.
+
+"Thank you! Though I wasn't fishing, I am grateful just the same."
+
+"Then you do find something now and then that you can stand for in
+me?"
+
+"I find a great deal--when you are Bert Chester." He seemed to puzzle
+over this, to ponder it; so that she added:
+
+"Let's not talk conundrums in this air and this crowd! We're not
+blue-nosed, self-searching New Englanders. Let's keep away from Market
+Street and walk through the Quarter. They haven't yet taken the
+Easter things from the shop windows, and there's a darling atrocious
+group of statuary next door to The Fior d'Italia which you must see!"
+And then, as they turned the corner--
+
+"What's the crowd? I'm for disremembering that I'm refined. I want to
+be curious!"
+
+"Looks like a scrap--do you--"
+
+"Nonsense! Come on. I divide women into those who would like to see a
+prize fight and admit it, and those who would like to see a prize
+fight and deny it!"
+
+"Gee whiz!" said Bertram. They had reached the edge of the crowd,
+which circled about some knot of violent struggle and gesture. "Excuse
+me!" He had sprung from her side and was breaking his way through. By
+instinct, she followed into the hole back of him, so that she found
+herself in the second row of spectators to a curious struggle, the
+details of which flashed in upon her all at once.
+
+Two laborers, gross, tanned, dirty, were fighting. They had swung
+side-on as the hole opened, and her glance focused itself upon the
+smaller of the two. He was an old man, quite gray; and down his scalp
+ran a stream of bright blood which trickled upon his ear. The thing
+which puzzled her was the action of the older man. He seemed to be
+hanging to the arms of his younger and sturdier opponent; also he was
+talking rapidly, excitedly; and she caught only one phrase.
+
+"Hit me with a nail, will you?"
+
+And just then the younger man got his arm free, and dove for the
+pavement--dove at precisely the same instant with Bertram Chester.
+Apparently, the younger fighter arrived first; he backed off from the
+scuffle brandishing a piece of packing box. Then she saw what the old
+man meant. Pointing the weapon was a nail, stained red.
+
+As this rough fury poised himself for the stroke, she took in the
+whole picture--a young, tall, brute man, one eye puffing from a new
+blow, the other blood-shot, the mouth open and dripping, the right arm
+raised for the murderer's blow.
+
+Bertram Chester came between as though he had risen out of the earth.
+His left hand, with a trained aptitude which made the motion seem the
+easiest thing in the world, caught the upraised wrist. The laborer
+ripped out an unconsidered oath and struck with his free fist at
+Bertram's face. Bertram evaded the blow, slipped in close. And
+then--in a lightning flash of speed, Bertram's right hand, which had
+been resting loosely by his side, shot upward. His whole body seemed
+to spring up behind it. The blow struck under the point of the chin.
+The head of the young bruiser dropped, then his shoulders, then his
+arms; his body sagged down upon Bertram. The champion of age shook him
+off; he dropped to the sidewalk. All this in a flash, in a wink.
+
+The crowd, curiously inert, as all city crowds are until the leader
+appears, now followed this leader. A clamor of many tongues
+arose--"Get a cop!" "He's killed him!" "Do him up!" A short rush of
+half a dozen boys toward the fallen bully met the resistance of
+Bertram, who had turned as though anticipating such a movement. He
+shoved them back and raised his hand. His eyes were bright, his face
+flushed, and that smile which won and commanded men had broken out on
+his lips.
+
+"Say," he said, "you all saw me do this man fair and square. He isn't
+dead. He's only put out. He'll be all right in five minutes. You know
+it was coming to him. Now, I've got a lady with me, and I don't want
+her dragged into the police station. The cops will be here in a
+minute. I'd like to show this thing up in court, but we don't want to
+trouble the lady, do we? If I beat it, how many of you will witness to
+the cops just what happened?"
+
+"I!" and "I!" and "I!" from the crowd and "Me! God bless ye!" from the
+elder warrior, who stood wiping the blood from his ear. Bertram gave
+them no chance for reconsideration. "All right!" he said, "here I go!"
+He pushed his way out as he pushed it in, swept Eleanor along with
+him. The spectators lifted a cheer; but only a mob of small boys
+followed.
+
+"Beat it, kids, or the bulls will pipe me!" called Bertram over his
+shoulder. At this magic formula, the boys fell out. A half a block
+away, Eleanor dared look back. A policeman had just arrived; he was
+clubbing his way stupidly through the crowd. Bertram looked back
+too.
+
+"All right," he announced, "now don't appear to hurry." At Kearney
+Street, he swung her aboard an electric car.
+
+"Victory!" she cried as the conductor rang his two bells and the car
+gathered headway. "It was perfect!"
+
+He stared down at her.
+
+"Well, I just had to put it through once I got started, but say--I
+thought you'd sure be sore on me." His voice took on an apologetic
+tone. "It seems to me when I see a scrap, I constitutionally can't
+keep out of it."
+
+"No more should you--such fights as that."
+
+"Then you make distinctions?" he asked.
+
+"If you mean that I distinguish between fighting just for the lust of
+it and fighting to protect the helpless, I may say that I do. You did
+well."
+
+"Thank you!" he said, half-earnestly. "I'd have thought you wouldn't
+like to see me muss things up, that way." He was letting his voice
+slip away from him, both in volume and in manner, and the car was
+crowded. A panic necessity for concealment took possession of her.
+
+"Surely we've evaded the police--let's get out and have our walk
+through the Quarter."
+
+"I'm with you." Kearney Street, that thoroughfare which gathered into
+its two miles every element in American life, here struck its hill
+rise. Sheer above them hung Telegraph Hill, attained by latticed
+sidewalks, half stairs. The Latin quarter thronged and played all
+about them in the dusk and the fresh lamplight. And again, mood and
+spirits rose in her. The event whose swift, kaleidoscopic action still
+danced on her retina, the very stimulus of brutal youth in action, had
+conspired with the perfect night to raise her above herself.
+
+"Oh, talk to me about it!" she said. "How did you do it--what do you
+call it--I want to hear _you_ tell about it."
+
+"I guess you saw it all--just a plain uppercut. Those blame city
+crowds would see a man killed before they'd think of anything but the
+show. I've always said that, and now I know it. I caught sight of the
+old man side-on and I saw he was hurt by something more than a punch.
+Far be it from me to spoil a good scrap, but that wasn't a fair shake.
+So I dropped you and started in. And then I saw that nail. I made a
+slip there," he let his voice fall in self-depreciation--"I should
+have kicked that chunk of board away, instead of diving for it. He
+beat me to it. The rest was so easy it was a shame to take the money.
+Up comes his head and up comes my guard"--he stopped in the street to
+illustrate--"and he couldn't use his club any more than a kitten. I'd
+have let him go, if he hadn't hit at me--and clipped me. For a second,
+I could have bit nails in two. When I pulled myself in close, there
+was his chin just above me--a be-auty target. And an uppercut was his
+medicine." Bertram jerked his right hand up from his hip to illustrate
+the uppercut. Then he screwed up his face and felt of his right
+shoulder. "He marked me some," he said in explanation.
+
+"Did he hurt you?" she asked with real concern. It ran into her mind
+that the conventional hero of romance makes his wound a scratch before
+his lady. If she expected that from Bertram Chester, he
+disillusionized her.
+
+"Well, you don't take a punch like that, even glancing on your
+shoulder, without something getting loose," he replied. "I shouldn't
+be surprised if I'd slipped a cog or a tendon or something."
+
+"Why--let's go home and see about it."
+
+"Oh, it isn't bad enough for that!" Then he fell into reminiscences.
+In their toilsome passage up the hen-coop sidewalks of Broadway, he
+gesticulated--with constrained motions of his right arm--loosed the
+sparkle of his energetic, magnetic talk upon her. She drew close to
+him. Gradually, as the steps became steep, her hand slipped under his
+arm. She was only half-conscious of this motion; her consciousness was
+full of a softening toward him, a leaning upon that strength which she
+had seen in action. On his side, he did not fail to notice it--this
+first movement in her which had seemed like an advance. He stopped his
+buzz of talk at one moment and all the lines of his face relaxed as
+though he were about to say something softer and deeper. But he only
+caught his breath and changed to another story. He had remembered--and
+just in time, he thought--the advice of Kate Waddington.
+
+But in spite of that remembrance, he permitted himself the luxury of
+being natural; and he talked continually until they were within the
+Tiffany doors.
+
+Mrs. Tiffany must hear all about it from both of them. When they came
+to the hero's injury, she dismissed Eleanor, made him strip his massy
+shoulder, and got out her pet liniment. The Judge, coming home in the
+midst of these surgical cares, heard the story retold with heroic
+additions by his wife. Dinner that night was a merry, a happy, an
+intimate party.
+
+When Bertram left, Mrs. Tiffany did not follow him to the door, as was
+her old-fashioned custom. He waited a moment, as though expecting
+something. His eyes were on Eleanor. She did not move. She only bade
+him a simple and easy good night over her shoulder.
+
+The old couple sat for a long time before the fire. Eleanor was
+gone--not to bed, could they but have known it, but to sit by her
+window and breathe bay-fragrance and drink the foggy night air off the
+Gate.
+
+The Judge smiled down on that faded daintiness at his feet.
+
+"Are we now to consider him in the light of a nephew-in-law?" he
+asked.
+
+"It has bothered me a good deal," said Mattie Tiffany. "What do you
+think I ought to do?"
+
+"If that frightful social responsibility of yours drives you to
+anything," responded the Judge, "I should say you'd best leave it
+alone."
+
+"But Edward, dear, I'm just like a mother to her--and goodness knows I
+haven't always been the best of mothers. There was her father--you
+know how long I shirked that--"
+
+"The sin of omission that you will carry to your grave--"
+
+"And somehow this is so like Billy Gray! It was just this way in her
+mother's case. When Billy came around--you remember how bonny a boy he
+was then, Edward--I, her own sister, could never tell how she felt
+toward him. I've always told you that Eleanor has slipped a
+generation. She's her grandmother, not her mother, in mind. But she's
+just like her mother in one thing. You can't ever tell what she's
+thinking about, and the deeper her thoughts go the harder it is to
+tell! That's why I'm considering all this so carefully--she doesn't
+commit herself in one way or the other. It's a sign."
+
+"Knowing you, Mattie, I presume that you've conducted researches into
+his desirability as a nephew-in-law?"
+
+"Well, shouldn't I? Goodness knows, we don't lead a conventional life
+in this family, and I don't chaperone her. I reproach myself a little
+with that. When Mrs. Goodyear wanted to take her up and put her into
+the Fortnightly, it wasn't so much Eleanor's disinclination as my own
+laziness about getting up gowns and paddling about paying calls which
+kept me back--and that's God's truth."
+
+"And these penitential exercises in detective work--what have they
+brought forth?"
+
+"He's a little careless morally, I think. He's had too much
+conviviality about the Club. I'm afraid he's blossoming over young.
+They can say all they want about wild oats, but in this city it's a
+mistake to sow them all at once. That's one reason why I've been so
+good to him. I flatter myself that a house like this is a moral
+influence on him."
+
+"It's all a concern for his soul with you, then?"
+
+"No. Frankly, I like him. Everyone likes him. He's a dear. But as to
+Eleanor--"
+
+The Judge had risen and taken off his skull cap.
+
+"Well, she has run a ranch and she's travelled alone to Europe and
+back, and she's saved the soul if not the body of a father. And I
+wonder whether a girl who's all that to her credit can't be trusted to
+deal with the problem of an undesirable though attractive young
+man--"
+
+"If I were only sure he was undesirable!"
+
+"It is according," responded the Judge, "to your definition of
+undesirability. If you mean worldly circumstances, you needn't fear
+for Bertram Chester. He resigns from my firm this month."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Attwood brought me news of it. I don't know where he's going. I'm not
+supposed to know anything. But for to get rich, for one thing." He
+closed his book and restored it to its place on the shelves. "He took
+the left-hand road, you see. It was manifest destiny; and you and I
+and Eleanor cannot move one whit the career of that young man."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+When Kate called him up over the telephone, inviting him, second-hand,
+to join a Masters party at Sanguinetti's restaurant, Bertram
+interrupted his banter to ask if Eleanor were going.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know what her plans are," said Kate. "Why don't you
+ask her?" The tone was a little cold.
+
+Remembering his duty, Bertram did ask Eleanor over the telephone.
+
+"I'm sorry," answered Eleanor, "but I had to decline."
+
+"Oh, duck your engagement if you have any!" he said, pleading like a
+boy. "It'll do you good to jolly up!" But she was firm. He matched the
+cool tone of Kate with the equally cool tone of Eleanor, and wondered,
+as he hung up the telephone, whether anything had gone wrong between
+those girls. He remembered now that he had not seen Kate at the
+Tiffany's since the expedition into Chinatown. Had he but known it,
+he was perceiving late a thing of which others were making gossip
+already.
+
+While Bertram freshened up his toilet in his room and thought hard on
+this, Kate Waddington, at home in the Mission, was making certain
+special preparations of her own. Mrs. Waddington could measure the
+importance of her daughter's engagements by the care she took with her
+toilet. Fresh lace indicated the first degree of importance, her
+latest pair of shoes the second degree, and perfectly fresh white
+gloves raised the engagement to the highest degree of all. To-night,
+all these omens served.
+
+Further, Mrs. Waddington saw that Kate was rummaging through the
+unanswered letters in her writing desk, saw that she was comparing two
+of them. Kate picked up the larger one. She was wearing furs, since
+the April night was chilly. This letter she tucked carefully into her
+muff.
+
+"Why in the name of common sense are you taking that letter along to a
+dinner party?"
+
+"Oh, something I want to show someone," answered Kate after a
+momentary pause. Mrs. Waddington knew from old times the hidden
+meaning of that pause. Just so, when at the age of seven they had
+caught her in the sugar-bowl, Kate had paused before starting her
+ready explanation. She had never overcome it; and her mother was the
+last person likely to acquaint her with that flaw of method.
+
+"It's from Alice Johnstone, I judge by the handwriting," continued
+Mrs. Waddington.
+
+"Oh, I guess so," responded Kate. She made rapidly for the door. "Good
+night, mother. I'll be home to-night, but rather late."
+
+"Thank you for small favors--" but Kate was gone.
+
+Sanguinetti's held a place in the old city no less definite than that
+of Zinkand's or the Poodle Dog. In the beginning a plain Italian
+restaurant, frequented by the Italian fishermen whose sashes made so
+bright the water front and whose lateen sails, shaped by the swelling
+wind like a horse's ear, gave delight to the bay, it had existed since
+the Neapolitans came to drag the Pacific with their nets. Painters and
+art students from the attics of the Quarter "discovered" it. When they
+made a kind of Bohemia about it, "the gang" of tawdry imitators and
+posing professional Bohemians followed as a matter of course. That
+invasion put it on the fair way toward failure. But Sanguinetti's
+saved itself by dropping one degree lower. "South of Market"
+discovered it. That district is somewhat to San Francisco as the East
+Side to New York, though with an indescribable difference. Then came
+the milliner's apprentice who slaved all the week that she might
+brighten the "line" on Saturday afternoon, with the small clerk, her
+companion or the butcher-boy her beau. There came also the little
+people of the race track, as jockies out of a job, touts, bookmakers'
+apprentices--tawdry people mainly, but ever good-humored and ready to
+loosen restraint of custom after the second quart of Steve
+Sanguinetti's red wine. So this place came to have an air of loose,
+easy, half-drunken camaraderie, which seldom fell into roughness. It
+was the home of noise and song and easy flirtations which died at the
+door. When this transformation was fully accomplished, the painters
+and art students and seekers after "life" came back again. This time,
+they did not spoil its flavor. The fishermen had been shy folk who
+fled from the alien invasion; no shyness about South-of-Market people
+on a holiday!
+
+This Sanguinetti dinner party of Sydney Masters's differed but
+slightly, after all, from other slumming parties in the hostelry of
+touch-and-go familiarities. Amused outsiders, they watched the growth
+of swift flirtations, passed comments on the overdressed women, joined
+in the latest Orpheum songs which started when the cheap wine made
+music in the throat, chucked quarters into the banjoes of the two
+negro minstrels who came in at eight o'clock to stimulate merriment.
+Bertram, in his position as jester to King Masters, went a little
+further than the others. It was he who bought out the stock of a small
+Italian flower-vendor, that he might present a bouquet "to every lady
+in the place." His attention brought from the ladies varying degrees
+of gratitude, and from their escorts degrees of resentment which
+varied still more. Running out of flowers before he had gone clear
+around the room, he built up on toothpicks bouquets of celery and
+radishes, which he fastened to the corks of empty claret bottles and
+gave, with elaborate presentation speeches, to the merrier and
+prettier of the neglected ladies.
+
+From this expedition, he returned leading a little, sad man, who had
+the look of a boy grown old by troubles. A bleached-blonde woman
+followed them half-way across, but centre room she turned back with a
+stamp of her foot and a flourish of her shoulders.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," Bertram announced, "I desire the privilege of
+introducing Teddy Murphy, California's premier jockey, lately set down
+on an outrageously false charge of pulling a horse. He is here, ladies
+and gentlemen, to tell you his troubles!"
+
+A moment of silent embarrassment on both sides.
+
+"Here--take my chair, Mr. Murphy!" spoke Kate from the foot of the
+table. The next table, set _a deux_, had just become vacant. Kate
+slipped into its nearest chair. Bertram's seat was back by the wall;
+to reach it, he must step over feet and so interrupt Mr. Murphy's tale
+of wrong. Nothing was more natural than that he should take the seat
+opposite Kate. And instantly--he having heard the story
+already--Bertram lost interest.
+
+"Would you mind getting my muff?" asked Kate. "I think my handkerchief
+is in it."
+
+As Bertram handed over the muff, she was smiling up at him. She did
+not look down until she had taken out her handkerchief, flirted out
+its folds. Then a little, disconcerted "oh!" escaped her.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+Kate was shaking out her skirt, was glancing rapidly to right and
+left. "Goodness!" she cried.
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"A letter. Have you seen it?"
+
+Bertram looked under the table. There it lay, by his chair. He picked
+it up and passed it over.
+
+"Oh!" she cried again, this time in a tone balanced between relief and
+embarrassment. She tucked it back into her muff, and her eyes avoided
+his. He noted all this pantomime, and he was about to speak, when Mrs.
+Masters touched Kate on the shoulder. "My dear, you're missing this!"
+she whispered.
+
+Kate put all her attention upon Mr. Murphy and his burning story about
+the pulling of Candlestick. Mr. Murphy grew a little too broad; Mrs.
+Masters, as the easiest way rid of him, rose and asked for her wraps.
+As Bertram assisted Kate, he saw her reach an anxious hand into her
+muff.
+
+Outside, she contrived a loose shoe lace, so that she and Bertram fell
+behind. She did not approach the subject of the letter; that came up
+later and, of course, quite incidentally.
+
+"Anything to confide in me to-night?" she began.
+
+"Oh, nothing much. Gee, you can't tell about her, can you? Say, are
+you sure about your system? She was with me last Tuesday when I
+punched the jaw off a man, and she hasn't treated me so well since I
+knew her as she did after that. I was blame near opening on her again.
+Blame near. What's the answer?"
+
+"A passing mood, perhaps."
+
+"Well, I'd like to get her in that mood often."
+
+"And you'll find that she's furthest from you in those moods--it's in
+them that she's least herself."
+
+"This general girl proposition is a tough one," commented Bertram.
+"All right. You know the dope."
+
+"You poor, perplexed boy!"
+
+"Say, isn't it time you began confiding?"
+
+"Oh, you caught it--the letter I mean--There are few things those eyes
+of yours don't see!"
+
+"Man?" he continued, ignoring the compliment.
+
+"Yes. It's a dreadful perplexity."
+
+"Tell your old uncle!"
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"You're in love?"
+
+"I--I was. You see--ah, it's gone past the place where it should have
+ended!"
+
+"Then why don't you break it off?"
+
+"That's all very well to say, but he's a good man, and he says he's
+crazy about me. Do I seem happy to you?"
+
+"Middling."
+
+"I am--sometimes. Then something like to-day comes, and it puts me
+clear down in the heart. I have to keep up laughing and being gay when
+I'm all torn to pieces. I feel that I oughtn't to keep him in suspense
+this way. He's young, he's fairly rich--if that counted. When he's
+here, I often think I do--love him. When he writes, I know I don't."
+
+"Poor little girl!" said Bert, catching sympathetically at the
+half-sob in her voice.
+
+"Thank you," answered Kate on an indrawn breath. And then, "What would
+you do? I'm only a girl after all, am I not? Here I'm leaning on you,
+asking for advice."
+
+Bertram did not answer for a time. Then:
+
+"Sure you don't love him?"
+
+"Not--not entirely. I might if he made me."
+
+Bertram was looking straight down on her. His mouth was pursed up.
+
+"Suppose he made you--and after you'd married him you got to feeling
+again as you do now. That wouldn't be square to him, would it?"
+
+"I--perhaps not. But oh, it would hurt him so!"
+
+"I guess he could live through it. They usually do, and don't lose
+many meals at that. I think he's running a bluff, myself."
+
+Kate drew slightly away from him.
+
+"That's a poor compliment."
+
+Bertram studied her meaning.
+
+"What?"
+
+"To say that a man _couldn't_ get crazy over me."
+
+"Oh! Not on your life. Sure thing no. I don't know a girl anywhere
+that a man has more license to get crazy over. You're a beauty and
+you're just about the best fellow I know."
+
+"I suppose you _had_ to say that!"
+
+"I figure that I wanted to. If I haven't said it before, it's
+because--" he stopped; Kate, as though it were an actual presence,
+could see the figure of Eleanor rising between them.
+
+"Yes, I know--" she said quickly. "You do think I'm attractive
+then--cross your heart."
+
+"Cross my heart, you're a beaut."
+
+"But that doesn't get me any further with my troubles."
+
+"What are his bad points that make you hold off?"
+
+"Nothing more than a feeling, I suppose. No, it's more than
+that--something definite. It's--I find this thing hard to say. Not
+exactly weakness in him--more a lack of proved strength. He inherited
+his money; he's had the regular Eastern education. He's at work,
+managing his properties. But I'd feel so much more secure of his
+strength if he had made it for himself. That is the thing I could
+admire most in a man; more even than kindness. To have him succeed
+from nothing because his strength was in it. I don't care how
+unfinished he might be--that would show he was a man!"
+
+Bertram was still pausing on this, when Kate touched his arm.
+
+"I'm afraid," she said, "that we must join the others. They'll be
+talking about us if we don't, and we mustn't have that--for Eleanor's
+sake if for no other!" They hurried ahead, therefore, and walked
+beside Mr. and Mrs. Masters all the way in.
+
+At the studio door, Kate declined a half-accepted invitation to remain
+for the night.
+
+"Mother isn't wholly well," she said, "and I can be fearfully domestic
+in emergency! It's only a step to the Valencia Street cars, and Mr.
+Bertram will get me home."
+
+It was still too early for the theatre crowd; they found themselves
+alone on the outer seat of a "dummy" car, one of those rapid transit
+conveyances by which San Francisco of old let the passenger decide
+whether that amorphic climate was summer or winter.
+
+He had, it seemed, to shake her back into the story of her
+love-affair. Three times he approached the subject, and each time she
+fended it off. They had passed clear into the Mission, were more than
+three-quarters of the way home, before he launched one of his frontal
+assaults.
+
+"You might give me some more work at my job of confidant," he said.
+
+She began again, then; a story without detail; more a sentimental
+exposure of her feelings. The thing was growing like a canker; she
+fought it, but the decision, the feeling of his unhappiness should she
+give him final rejection, roosted on her pillow. It had never come to
+an engagement; it had been only an understanding; but she thought of
+dreadful things, even of his possible suicide, whenever she
+contemplated giving him the final blow.
+
+The old-fashioned Waddington house stood on a big Spanish lot far out
+in the Mission. There was ground to spare; enough so that its original
+owners had room to plant trees without shading light from the windows.
+As they walked into the deep shadows, her voice took on an intonation
+like a suppressed sob.
+
+"It is a comfort now to have said it, and it's a new life to have you
+for support. Oh, Bertram, what a big, strong friend you are! Be good
+to me, won't you?"
+
+She had stopped; in the shadows the clouded moon of her face looked up
+into his.
+
+"Oh, won't you be good to me?"
+
+He slipped his arm about her; and suddenly he kissed her.
+
+She suffered his kiss for only a moment; then she moved away. He let
+her go, and she rushed ahead to the door. When he reached the step,
+she had faced about.
+
+"Consider my _feelings_, Bert Chester," she said; and the screen door
+slammed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+Just where the Santa Eliza trail commanded sight of the main travelled
+road, Eleanor sat on a rock watching the hill-shadows lengthen on the
+valley below, watching a mauve haze deepen on the dark-green tops of
+redwood trees. The time was approaching when she must hurry back to
+Mrs. Goodyear's bungalow for a dinner which she dreaded. Three weeks
+of perplexity had bred in her a shrinking from people. She had found
+excuse to wander away alone.
+
+That lazy spring of the North woods, so like to early fall in other
+climates, had given her at first the healing of spirit which she
+needed. She wandered hither and yon as her fancy led her, following
+this trail, pushing into that opening in the chapparal. She had come
+out upon the Santa Eliza trail and gained sight of the road before she
+realized with a kind of inner shame the way in which her feet of
+flesh had been tending, the direction in which she had been turning
+her eyes of the spirit.
+
+Three miles away on the summit of the next ridge was the Masters
+ranch, and there rested the centre of her soul-storm. Bertram Chester,
+she knew by chance, was spending the week-end with the Masters.
+
+She stopped by the rock, then; and immediately nature went out of her
+heart and the world entered. For three intolerable weeks, this
+heaviness had been descending upon her as by a whimsy of its own. Like
+the water of those cupped wheels in her little irrigation plant at the
+ranch, this black liquid, when it had filled its vessel to the brim,
+would empty automatically without touch on the spring of her will.
+When this came, she would feel rested, healed, in a state of dull
+peace. Now the struggle of thought was on her again. As always before,
+it began with an arraignment of the facts in the case, a search of
+memory for any forgotten data which might lead to a conclusion.
+
+The first crisis arrived on the evening when Judge Tiffany came home
+in a plain mood of disgust, and announced baldly:
+
+"Well, Mattie; our young friend did everything I expected of him."
+
+He went on quite simply with the news. Bertram Chester had left him
+almost without notice. But that was to be expected. The rest was the
+worst. Bertram had gone to Senator Northrup--as manager of his real
+estate interests. The name Northrup was as the name of the devil in
+that household. Northrup's operations included not only law and
+politics but latterly speculative and unprincipled ventures in
+business. A dying flash of his old fire woke in Judge Tiffany when he
+spoke as he felt about this young cub who had bitten his caressing
+hand.
+
+Eleanor left the dinner table as soon as she had a fair excuse. She
+found herself unable to bear it. Had she remained, she must have
+defended him. But alone in her living room she look counsel of this
+treason and agreed in her heart with her uncle. The very manner in
+which he had done it--never a hint, never a preliminary mention of
+Northrup--appealed to her as the deepest treason of all.
+
+The next evening, Bertram Chester had the superb impudence to call.
+Eleanor was alone in the house that night. She hesitated when the
+maid brought in his name, then shook herself together and went out to
+face him.
+
+He met her with an imitation of his old manner, an assumption that his
+change in employment would make no difference in his social relations
+with the Tiffanys. What words had she used to let him know her
+feelings? She could not remember now. But it had come hard; for the
+unmoral half of her perceptions was noting how big and beautiful he
+looked, how his blush, as of a stripling facing reproof, became him.
+
+He pleaded, he stormed, he presumed, he passed in and out of sulky
+moods, he began to defend himself against the silent attack of her
+look. Why hadn't he a right to do it? A man should look out for
+himself. But he'd have stayed and rotted with the old law office if
+he'd felt that she would take it that way.
+
+"You mean more to me than success!" he said.
+
+"No more of that, please!" she cried. After that cry, she fell into
+dignified silence as the only defence against the double attack from
+him and from the half of her that yearned for him. From her silence he
+himself grew silent until, with a boyish shake of his
+shoulders--lovable but comically inadequate--he bade her good night.
+
+"You'll cool off!" he said at the door.
+
+"Good bye," she responded simply.
+
+"No, it's good night," he answered.
+
+She woke next morning with a sense of vacancy in heart and mind.
+Something was gone. She did nothing for a week but justify herself for
+calling that something back, or nerve herself to let it go.
+
+On the one hand, her mind told her that he had done the ungrateful,
+the treasonable thing. It did not matter that he might have done it
+through mere lack of finer perception. That was part of his
+intolerability. On the other hand, her heart ran like a shuttle
+through a web of his smiles, his illuminations, the shiver, as from a
+weapon suddenly drawn, of his unexpected presence, even his look when
+he stood at the door to receive her final good bye. The woof of that
+web was the sense of vacancy in her--the unconquerable feeling that a
+thing by which she had lived was utterly lost.
+
+And where would he go if she let him go? Ah, the inn was ready, the
+room was swept. He would go inevitably to Kate Waddington. That would
+be hard to bear. Sense of justice was strong in Eleanor; she realized
+the ungenerosity of this emotion while she continued to harbor it. But
+was there not justice in it after all? Kate Waddington could grasp,
+could guide, only the worst part of him. Kate Waddington had in her no
+guidance for the better Bertram Chester, who must be in him somewhere.
+She hugged this justification to herself. Perhaps it was not right to
+let him go; perhaps her heart and her duty were as one.
+
+A cock quail came out from the chapparal, saw her, and bobbed back;
+the feet of his flock rustled the twigs. Now he was raising his spring
+call--"muchacho!" "muchacho!" Clearer and slighter came the call of
+his mate--"muchacho!" "muchacho!" A ground squirrel shook the
+laurel-bush at her side, so that its buds brushed her shoulder. The
+cock quail came back into the pathway, slanted his wise head, plumed
+in splendor, to find whether she were friend or enemy, saw that she
+made no move, and fell to foraging among the leaves. She had sat so
+long and so quietly that the little people of the ground were
+accepting her as part of the landscape. She began dimly to perceive
+these things, to take joy in them. And then they colored her mood.
+
+What was she but a young, female thing, a vessel of life universal?
+What was her attraction toward Bertram Chester but a part of the
+great, holy force which made and moved hills, trees, the little people
+of hills and trees? What was she, to have resisted the impulse in her
+because of a few imperfections, a little lack of development in
+civilized morals?
+
+Her perception of nature died away, but the slant which it had given
+her thoughts persisted.
+
+When she felt and spoke as she had done that night in the Man Far Low,
+she was unwholesome, super-refined, super-civilized--she was
+proceeding by the hothouse morals which she had learned in books and
+in European studios. When she felt as she did on that first night
+under the bay tree, she was wholesome and eternally right.
+
+How much greater in her, after all, if she had followed the call, had
+taken him for the man in him, to develop, to guide as a woman may
+guide! Ah, by what token could she call him back?
+
+Her gaze of meditation had been fixed on the road below. She had been
+half-consciously aware for some time of a figure which lost itself
+behind one of the hill-turns, reappeared again, became wholly visible
+in a band of late afternoon sunshine.
+
+It was Bertram Chester. The vision came without any shock of first
+surprise. He had been so much part of her thoughts that it seemed the
+most natural presence in the world. He was swinging along the road in
+her direction, heaving his massive shoulders with every stride; he
+stopped, took off his cap, wiped his forehead with a motion which,
+seen even at that distance, conveyed all his masculinity, and strode
+on again.
+
+Would he keep on along the road, or would he turn toward her up the
+Santa Eliza trail? And if he did keep on, would those roving eyes of
+his perceive her sitting there? Why not leave everything to that
+chance? If he looked up and saw her there on her rock, if he turned
+into the trail and passed her--that was a sign. She found herself,
+nevertheless, humanly striving to cheat fortune and the gods by
+fixing all her mind and eyes upon him, as though she would hypnotize
+him into looking up.
+
+But her mind and eyes had no power over him. He kept on with his even
+gait until he was lost behind the clump of trees which marked the
+branching of the trail. One chance was gone; she might not know the
+issue of the other until time and waiting informed her. How long
+before she should know? She crouched low on the rock and tried not to
+think.
+
+The twigs and pebbles crunched under heavy feet; the branches shook
+and rustled; a blue sweater became visible in the shadows. She looked
+away.
+
+"Well, I'll be--eternally blowed!" His voice came out like an
+explosion. Much as she expected it, she started. When, after a moment,
+she dared look up, he stood over her.
+
+"Are you going to run away?" he asked. His voice, with its ripple like
+laughter, showed that he expected nothing of the kind.
+
+"No," she answered, superfluously.
+
+He seemed, then, to feel the necessity for explanation.
+
+"I hadn't an idea--"
+
+"Neither had I." She broke in to anticipate his thought. Each was
+lying a little; and both knew it. She rushed to commonplaces.
+
+"Uncle Edward and I are at Mrs. Goodyear's bungalow over Sunday. It's
+our last expedition out of town before we go down to the ranch."
+
+"Well, I must have had a hunch! I'm at the Masters ranch over Sunday.
+I got a freak idea to take a walk alone. It sure was a hunch!" Soft
+sentiment tinged his voice. She answered nothing.
+
+"A hunch that you were alone here, nobody to interrupt--say, are you
+still sore on me?"
+
+"I--I didn't run away--"
+
+"Oh, I knew you'd get over it. I think even the Judge will get over
+it. I don't believe he'd care anyhow, if it wasn't for his old grouch
+on Senator Northrup."
+
+"Perhaps. He's said nothing--to me--"
+
+"But it's you I care about. Only you. I told you that and I mean it. I
+don't want you to be sore--I'd go back and bury myself in the old
+office for life if I thought it would make it different with you."
+
+"Would you, Bertram?"
+
+He leaned close to her; she could feel his compelling eyes burning
+into her averted face. With one part of her, she was conscious that
+here was a crisis too great for her fully to feel; with the other
+part, she was aware that an ant, dragging a ridiculously heavy straw,
+was toiling up her rock.
+
+Now he had her hand, which lay inert in his; now his arm was about her
+shoulder; and now he was speaking again:
+
+"Can't you? Can't you stop looking down on me and believe I'm going to
+be good enough for you?"
+
+She found power of speech.
+
+"I never--I don't think that I'm too good for you!" Her Rubicon was
+crossed. It was a strangely long time before he kissed her, but the
+silent interval after the kiss was stranger and longer still.
+
+"Tell me what you plan for our future, Bertram, for I am afraid!" she
+whispered at length.
+
+"It's got to be a wait--that's the risk you take with a comer. I'll go
+on twice as fast for you. What do you want--shall we tell about it,
+girlikins?"
+
+"As you wish, Bertram."
+
+"I guess we'd better not, then--not until the old Judge gets his back
+down. Let's have it just between me and my little girl.
+
+"Say!" he added, the sentiment blowing out of his tone, "what was the
+matter, anyhow, that night on the restaurant balcony? Why did you turn
+me down then, and what made you so sore? I've never quite got to your
+thoughts, you know. But I'm going to!" He drew her closer. "Every one
+of them!"
+
+She dropped her face on his shoulder.
+
+"Ah, we've so many things to talk about, Bertram, and there's so much
+time! I've been a girl that didn't know her mind. Shan't we let that
+rest now? Shan't we be contented with what to-day has brought you and
+me?"
+
+A film clouded his face.
+
+"Yes--if you want it that way."
+
+"Hoo-ooo-ooo!" Clear and high, but quavering, a masculine voice was
+calling across the ridge. Eleanor sprang up.
+
+"That's Uncle Edward--it's dinner-time--do you want him to find
+you--you'd better go!"
+
+He stood as though considering.
+
+"All right. When are you going back?"
+
+"We catch the seven train to-morrow afternoon at Santa Eliza."
+
+"Darn! I'd engaged to take on the five-ten at Las Olivas. I've half a
+notion to change and join you and see what the old man says--"
+
+"No, Bertram, it's better not. We'll find a way. Go now!"
+
+"You bet we will--good bye, girlikins!" He made no move to kiss her
+again; he turned and crashed down the trail.
+
+Eleanor sped up the trail. Safe on the summit of the ridge, her secret
+hidden behind her, she answered the call. Then she dared look back at
+the figure vanishing in deep shadow below. Her expression and
+attitude, soft-eyed and drooping though they were, showed other
+emotions than unmixed happiness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+Judge Tiffany turned from a consideration of the hillside to a closer
+consideration of Eleanor, who rode beside him in the Goodyear trap.
+She sat very straight, her hands folded in her lap, her grave, grey
+eyes staring not at hillsides nor spring skies, but into the far
+horizons.
+
+Since he recovered from that purely human rage against this youth who
+had betrayed him to his dearest enemy, the Judge had been watching,
+with all his old interest, the surface indications of Eleanor's moods.
+Last night, it had been a kind of gaiety; to-day the mood was quiet,
+but not at all despondent; there was life in it. Judge Tiffany held
+his own views on the relations between his niece and Bertram Chester,
+and on the right or convenience of interfering. Twice he had been on
+the point of telling her that his feeling toward Bertram Chester
+should not color hers; that his house was still open to the young
+man. But the curiosity of philosophical age to see how things will
+turn out had prevented him.
+
+It was just as well. They were on the eve of their summer flight to
+the ranch, where she would have other things to think about than young
+men. That was his half-expressed theme when he spoke:
+
+"Well, girl, will you be glad to get back to work again? You missed
+last summer."
+
+Eleanor started as out of sleep.
+
+"I think I am glad of everything!" she said cryptically. As though to
+turn the subject, she indicated a buckboard which was coming down an
+intersecting by-road at crazy speed.
+
+"Why are they driving so fast?"
+
+The Goodyear driver turned with the familiarity of a country
+henchman.
+
+"That's the doctor's rig from Las Olivas," he said, "and he's sure
+going some!" Followed a monologue on the doctor and his habits.
+
+About the next bend of the road, a little boy rushed from a wayside
+camp which looked strangely deserted for supper-time of Sunday
+afternoon. He waved both arms before his face.
+
+"Hey, mister, take me to the wreck!"
+
+"What wreck, kid?"
+
+"The five-ten is over the trestle, and they went off and left me!"
+
+Judge Tiffany took the information calmly, even selfishly. "I wonder
+if we'd better turn back and give it up to-night, or go on?"
+
+Eleanor spoke with a catch of the breath, a drawn-in tone.
+
+"Go on! Oh, tell him to go on!"
+
+The Judge peered at her. She was pale, but, as always in her crises,
+the curtain of inscrutability made her face a mask. "Oh, do go on!"
+she repeated. Then, as though it all needed explanation, she added:
+
+"We might be able to help!"
+
+"Drive on, then--fast!"
+
+Absolutely passive, Eleanor swayed a little with the trap, but made no
+motion of her own. Indeed, there was little motion within. The train
+had gone over the trestle, that was all. Bertram Chester was on that
+train. She must not try to think it out--must only hold tight to
+herself until she found how God had decided for her. Once it did occur
+that she had fretted her heart away over shadowy ills, toy troubles,
+while Bertram walked the earth free and healthy. How trivial those
+troubles seemed beside this real apprehension! Once again, she
+wondered how she had been cruel enough to hold him at arm's length so
+long. Was this to be the punishment for her folly?
+
+A buckboard, driven furiously, came over the hill-rise before
+them--the doctor's rig.
+
+"Ask him--ask him!" she called to her driver. As they drew up
+alongside, the doctor's driver began talking without need for
+inquiries.
+
+"Spread rail! The rear car just bucked over the trestle--"
+
+"Anybody dead?"
+
+"Two that I saw--and everybody in the rear car hurt. They're loading
+'em on the front car to take 'em to town. Good bye--I've got to bring
+back medicine before they start!"
+
+The chances were even--the chances were even. If he had been in the
+front car--relief. If he had been in the rear car--
+
+The thing opened before them like a panorama as they topped the hill.
+The engine puffing regularly, normally, the baggage car and one coach
+on the rails behind it; a little crowd buzzing and rushing up and down
+the trestle; a black, distorted mass of iron and splinters at the
+edge of the water below. Three or four heads appeared above the
+trestle, and the people swarmed in that direction. The heads grew to
+four men, carrying between them a bundle covered by a red blanket.
+
+Judge Tiffany spoke for the first time.
+
+"You'd better not see it, Nell!"
+
+His words seemed to draw the curtain away from her self-control.
+
+"Oh, go on--for God's sake, go on!"
+
+As they drew up beside the undamaged coach, the bearers had just
+arrived with another body. Eleanor jumped down, rushed to the
+platform. The thing under the blanket was a woman. She turned into the
+coach, apprehension growing into certainty. She had not seen him in
+the crowd. If he were unhurt, he must be first and foremost among the
+workers.
+
+The coach was a hospital--limp, bandaged people propped up on every
+seat; in a little space by the further door, a row of quiet figures
+which lay as though sleeping. Above them bent two men. Their
+business-like calm showed that they were physicians. The half of her
+which stood aloof, observing all things, wondering at all things, the
+half whose influence kept her now so calm and sane, marvelled that she
+heard no moaning, tormented sounds. They were in the second stage of
+injury; the blessed anaesthesia of nature was upon them. For human
+speech, she heard only the low, quick voices of those who healed and
+nursed.
+
+She saw a bare arm lifted from the press of huddled forms, saw that a
+physician had pressed a black bulb to it. The hand--the inevitable
+configuration of that arm which she had never seen bare--and she knew
+him.
+
+Bertram lay on his side. His eyes were closed, his whole figure
+huddled; yet something more than the quiver of his body at the prick
+of the syringe told her that he was alive. His color had changed but
+little; hovering death showed mainly by a sharpening of all the lines
+of his face. Yet it did not seem to be Bertram, but rather some
+statue, some ghastly replica of him.
+
+The physician stood up and stretched his back. She came close.
+
+"Will he live?"
+
+He turned impatiently, but he caught her eyes.
+
+"He has a chance. He's young and strong--Is he--yours?"
+
+"Yes--yes! What shall I do for him?"
+
+"Are you sure you're strong enough--you won't faint nor carry on?"
+
+"No--no! I'm sure of that. What may I do?" Judge Tiffany was beside
+her now. He looked, understood, and said nothing.
+
+"Thank God for you, then! With all the crowd we haven't sane people
+enough to nurse one baby! Everything's the matter with him--broken
+arm, broken collar-bone, shock, and maybe he's injured internally. We
+can't be sure about that yet. I'm trying to make him comfortable,
+but"--here the agitated man broke through the calm physician for a
+moment--"No braces, no slings, no anything! We're going to town as
+soon as this company will let us. And he must be held. It's the only
+way to keep him comfortable. Come!"
+
+Judge Tiffany touched the doctor's arm, but he spoke to Eleanor.
+
+"Nell--you'd better let a man do that."
+
+"No. You may help. How shall I hold him?"
+
+All her will concentrated on obedience to direction, she followed the
+doctor while he drew Bertram's bare arm over her shoulder, set a
+cushion at his back, showed her how she must support his neck with her
+right hand.
+
+"Hold him as long as you can, then have your friend relieve you. But
+change no more often than you find necessary. He'll get jostled enough
+before we reach town."
+
+The Judge seated himself calmly. She was alone with the care of her
+dying. The necessity for comforting and reassuring him came into her
+mind.
+
+"It's all right, Bertram; it's all right!" she whispered. He returned
+no answer, even of a flickering eyelash. He lay still, inert, a great
+bulk that tugged at the muscles of her arms.
+
+After a time, her frame adjusted itself to the position. Her
+perceptions, still keenly alive, told her that her doctor was working
+over a woman in the corner. Just as the train started, she saw him
+rise, wipe his hands on his handkerchief, and motion calmly to two of
+the men. They lifted the woman. Eleanor realized all at once what the
+motion signified. They had taken her to join the dead in the baggage
+car.
+
+Next to Bertram lay an old man, his head so wrapped in bandages that
+she could see only the tip of his grey beard. A middle-aged
+woman--Eleanor recognized her as a camper whom they had passed on the
+road but yesterday--knelt beside him, talking into his ear about his
+soul. "Do you lean on your Savior?" she whispered. A kind of passing
+impatience touched Eleanor. So much had her sympathetic spirit
+absorbed the feelings of these dying ones, that she resented this as
+an intrusion, an unwelcome distraction from the business of sloughing
+off the flesh.
+
+A little sag of Bertram's body, which alarmed her for a moment until
+she saw that the movement came from relaxation of her own arms, called
+her back to responsibility. The realization that it _had_ called her
+back brought with it the amazing, shameful realization that it had
+ever wandered away.
+
+Why--
+
+From the moment when she took him into her arms, she had never thought
+of him as her dying lover--never as her lover at all!
+
+A man in extremis, a thing so beaten and suffering that she called for
+it on her Christ--he was all that, in common with the other beaten and
+battered and senseless wrecks about them. But the feeling that he was
+her own, about to go from her, had never entered her heart. She was
+ashamed while she thought of it; but it persisted. Not hers? Why, she
+had suffered him to kiss her only yesterday! Must she think of such
+things with a life to save?
+
+Now, her body was giving way with weariness; it seemed that she could
+hold him no longer. She nodded to Judge Tiffany, therefore; the old
+man rose and gently took her burden from her. She sank back on the
+empty seat. When the faintness of fatigue had passed, she fixed her
+eyes on the still face of him who had been her lover.
+
+Why was it? The clear-cut profile, so refined and beautiful since
+suffering gave it the final touch, had thrilled her only yesterday and
+through a succession of yesterdays. It had no power to thrill her now.
+She tried to put back this unworthy thought, but it persisted. In
+spite of pity and all decency of the heart, that outer self of hers
+kept saying it to her like an audible voice. Were he to die now, in
+her arms, she should work and weep and pray over his passing--but only
+as she would work and weep and pray over that alien old man who lay
+beside him, that woman whom they had just carried away.
+
+The Judge was flagging. He glanced wearily over his shoulder, as
+though he hesitated to ask for relief. She rose; and without a word
+she took his place. And now, as she knelt with Bertram's slight yet
+heavy breathing in her ear, her thoughts became uncontrollable
+nightmare--scattered visions and memories of old horrors, as when she
+saw her father drunk on the pavement; a multitude of those little
+shames which linger so long. One incident which was not quite a shame
+thrust itself forward most insistently of all. It was that episode
+under the bay tree, when she was only a little girl. Why did that
+memory start to the surface those tears which had been falling so long
+within? Her weeping seemed to lift her to a tremendous height of
+perception, as though that outer self had flowed in upon her.
+
+That which had lured her and dragged her to him in the end, was the
+life in him, the strong, vigorous body, the gestures, the smiles. That
+which had held her away from him was the soul within him--high and
+clean enough as souls go, but not one which she could ever know, and
+not one which could ever know hers. In this struggle of passing, he
+was all soul; the body was not in it.
+
+She held the plan of her puzzle; it was necessary only to set the
+scattered blocks into place.
+
+She found herself whispering to him; she checked herself until she
+remembered that he could not hear:
+
+"O Bertram, you are not mine! O Bertram, you could never be mine!"
+
+Now she could look straight at the possibility of his death or
+recovery. And she could weigh and choose, in case it was life, between
+telling him what she felt, or going on with him to the end--walking
+with a soul apart, yet choosing paths for it, too. That last might be
+the road of honor. That fine and heroic course, indeed, came to her
+with a high appeal. She had made her one resolve of duty. Perhaps it
+was her destiny to immolate herself for duty to the end.
+
+The train bowled on, stopping for no stations. The old man in the
+corner was unconscious or asleep; the woman who tended him had stopped
+her spiritual ministrations. A child, propped up in one of the rear
+seats, had awakened to cry, fallen asleep, awakened and wept again.
+She had in her voice a thick, mucous note, which became to Eleanor the
+motif in that symphony of misery. Otherwise, no one seemed to be
+making sound except the two physicians. Her own doctor came up once,
+pressed a syringe again into the bare arm, whispered that it was all
+going well.
+
+A whistle came muffled through the fog; they were slowing down. It was
+a station; the lights, the clamor of human voices, proved it. Eleanor
+looked out of the window. A knot of young men had broken for the
+platform; and she could distinguish the black boxes of cameras. There
+arose a sharp parley at the rear door; her doctor muttered
+"reporters--damn!" and hurried back. Judge Tiffany rose and followed
+him. Over her shoulder Eleanor caught the white, intent face of Mark
+Heath. "He knows; they have told him," she thought.
+
+Judge Tiffany, his mind on the practical necessities of the case,
+still had it in him to admire the control of that good soldier, the
+modern reporter. When he told simply what had happened, how the issue
+lay balanced between life and death, Mark only said:
+
+"My God!--and me with the story to do!" Then his eye caught Eleanor.
+
+"Did she--has she been nursing him?"
+
+Judge Tiffany glanced at the other reporters, clustered about the
+conductor, at the photographers, holding animated wrangle with the
+physicians about flashlights.
+
+"Keep her out of your story--you can do that. Say I found him on the
+train--put me in--that's a good story enough. Keep my niece out. Keep
+the others off. Keep those flashlights muffled!"
+
+Mark hurried forward. One look, a look which contorted his face, he
+bent on Bertram. Then he spoke puzzles to Eleanor.
+
+"You're Miss Brown, a camper at Santa Eliza, if anyone asks you--and
+when we leave this train you stay by me and do everything I tell
+you."
+
+"Very well."
+
+Mark touched Bertram's face with a tenderness almost feminine. "Poor
+old man!" he whispered; and he hurried back.
+
+A shock-headed youth accosted him.
+
+"What's up there?" he asked.
+
+"Good story," answered Mark. "I've got it all--don't you fellows
+bother. Bertram Chester, old California Varsity tackle, real estate
+manager for Northrup and Co., seriously injured, may not recover. Get
+his injuries from the doctor. His late employer, Judge Edward C.
+Tiffany, reached this train at Santa Eliza and has been taking care of
+him."
+
+A voice came from the group of reporters:
+
+"Why, he's your roommate!"
+
+"I know it--damn it! Keep on. Judge Tiffany has been caring for him,
+holding him up so he could bear it, assisted by Miss Sadie Brown, a
+camper at Santa Eliza. She's the one I was talking to."
+
+"Who is she? Any chance for a photograph?"
+
+"I braced her for a picture. She wouldn't stand for it."
+
+"Let me try! I'll get it."
+
+"See here, you fellows, I'll attend to that. I'll let you all in if
+she gives up. I'll play you square. He's my roommate--can't you trust
+me to handle it? Keep on. Miss Sadie Brown, works at the Emporium,
+lives 2196 Valencia--" Mark was reading from a perfectly blank sheet
+of copy paper--"Judge Tiffany will take him home. He wired ahead for a
+private ambulance from Havens. That's all of that. Now what have you
+fellows got? Help me out; it's none too easy for me."
+
+As he took notes, asked questions, formed his "story" in his mind,
+Mark never took his eyes off that group in the corner.
+
+Now they were racing down the last stage of the trip, with full
+freeway. Now they were drawing into the ferry station. Under the
+lights stood a buzzing crowd, its blacks shot with the white coats of
+hospital orderlies. A dozen ambulances, their doors open, stood backed
+to the platform. Eleanor sagged down on the floor with a sigh as two
+orderlies lifted Bertram's arms from her shoulders, made shift to get
+him upon their stretcher.
+
+But the doctor stopped them.
+
+"Get this old man first," he said, "and be careful. That young fellow
+ought to pull through."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+Toward morning, Eleanor managed to get a little sleep. When full
+daylight wakened her to the dull realization of her situation and
+burdens, she hurried into clothes, crept to the solid, old-fashioned
+best bedroom where they had put Bertram, and took counsel of the
+nurse. Everything was hopeful; she got that from the professional
+patter of temperatures and reactions. It seemed that there might be no
+internal hurt. He had roused from his shock in the night; had seemed
+to know where he was and what had happened. He lay now in a natural
+sleep, but he must be kept very quiet.
+
+On the way downstairs, Eleanor met face to face with her aunt. Mrs.
+Tiffany had been awake since the ambulance brought responsibility; but
+her eyes showed more than want of sleep. The two women stopped, looked
+long at each other; then Mrs. Tiffany took Eleanor tenderly in her
+arms and kissed her.
+
+"Don't you worry, dear," she whispered, "he will get well, and
+everything will be all right with Edward and me."
+
+Eleanor did not answer at first. She drew a little away from her
+aunt's embrace, before she found tongue to say:
+
+"Please don't speak of that, Aunt Mattie--oh, not of that now!"
+
+As she made her way out to the piazza, in an instinctive search for
+air and room, she was crying.
+
+In the limpness of reaction, she sank into a chair. Every joint and
+muscle, she realized now, ached and creaked. She could lift her arms
+only after taking long thought with herself; and the soul within was
+as burned paper.
+
+The front gate clicked. The first, doubtless, of those inquiring
+visitors who would read a meaning into the adventures of last night.
+That, too, was to be faced this day! The pattering, hurrying footsteps
+sounded near to her before she looked up and recognized Kate
+Waddington.
+
+If Kate had been crying, the only evidence was a hasty powdering which
+left streaks of white and pink before her ears. On first glance,
+Eleanor marvelled at her appearance of control, at the lack of
+emotion in her face. But insight rather than conscious vision told
+Eleanor of the currents which were running under that mask. At the
+bottom Eleanor detected a fear which was not only apprehension of the
+news from Bertram Chester, but also a cowardly shrinking from the
+situation. She fancied that she could even trace Kate's consideration
+of the proper shade of acting in the circumstances. All this in the
+moment before Kate sprang up the steps and asked:
+
+"Oh, will he live?"
+
+A baser nerve in Eleanor quivered with the desire to be cruel. She had
+to put it down before she could tell the simple truth. One little
+corner of Kate's mouth quivered and jerked for a second under her
+teeth before she caught herself and resumed the impersonation of a
+solicitous friend.
+
+"Tell me all about it," she said.
+
+"Ah, I am too tired!" Nevertheless, Eleanor did manage a plain tale,
+ending with the nurse's report and with her own conviction that he
+would live.
+
+"Oh, of course he will live!" And then--"Who is nursing him?"
+
+She looked up on this question, which was also an appeal, a begging.
+
+"We have a nurse," answered Eleanor shortly. It gratified her a
+little, in her low state of consciousness, to be thus abrupt. The
+better part of her realized this; saw how she was wreaking the revenge
+of an old emotion. A reaction of generosity prompted her next words;
+but she spoke with an effort.
+
+"You may help if you want to. Uncle Edward must go to the ranch this
+week--unless--don't you want to come here and stay in my spare room?"
+It seemed to Eleanor that she had never made a harder sacrifice than
+the one which she sealed with that invitation.
+
+This, too, brought Kate out of her impersonation. Her whole figure
+straightened for a second, and--
+
+"Oh, might I?" she said.
+
+"I should be very glad. Will you come up to see him--one may look in
+at the door. He is in Uncle Edward's spare chamber."
+
+As they threaded the involved halls of that rambling dwelling, Kate
+hurried on ahead. Eleanor, from the rear, threw out a word or two by
+way of direction. At the door, opened to get air of a dull and heavy
+morning, they peered into the grim order of the sick room. The nurse
+had already stripped it to hospital equipment. His face, refined
+almost into beauty by pain and low-running blood, lay tilted to one
+side as he slept. The nurse touched her lips. Eleanor nodded. The
+nurse turned back toward her patient. Eleanor dared look at Kate.
+
+Her color had changed from pale, back to the pink of life; now it was
+turning pale again. She noticed neither Eleanor nor the nurse; she
+stood as one in a universe unpeopled save by herself and another.
+Once, her two arms quivered with an involuntary outward motion, and
+once she swayed against the lintel.
+
+And Eleanor, watching her through this wordless passage, gathered all
+the currents that had been running through her will into an
+indeterminate determination. In that moment she realized the full
+bitterness of a renunciation that does not mean renouncing a wholly
+dear and desired thing, but does mean renouncing the beloved thing
+which one is better without.
+
+Kate turned at length. Eleanor, as their eyes met, could read in her
+face and body the change as the actress took command once more. Kate
+flew at once to her hollow conventional phrases.
+
+"The poor, poor boy!" she said. "Oh, we must all help!"
+
+Eleanor turned away with the feeling that this made it harder for her
+to perform her renunciation--if real renunciation it were.
+
+The day brought too much work, activity, purely material anxiety, for
+a great deal of thought. They had cut off the telephone in the main
+wing of the Tiffany house and switched the current to the instrument
+in Eleanor's living-room. Most of the day she spent answering that
+telephone. People of whom she had never even heard, made anxious
+inquiries about the condition of Mr. Chester. Before night the
+newspapers became a plague. For in the afternoon, winged reporters,
+shot out in volleys for a "second day story," had called at 2196
+Valencia and found there no Sadie Brown. Hurrying down the back trail
+to the Emporium, they did discover an indignant little shop-girl of
+that name. Those reporters who had been with the wreck the night
+before found no resemblance in her to the mysterious lady. Then came
+a bombardment, in person and by telephone, of the Tiffany house. The
+Judge, meeting all callers at the front door, lied tactfully. The city
+editors gave up sending reporters and took to bullying over the
+telephone; so that the burden of an unaccustomed lying fell upon
+Eleanor. At eleven o'clock, and after one voice had declared that the
+_Journal_ had the whole account and would make it pretty peppery if
+the Tiffanys did not confirm it, Eleanor took the telephone off the
+hook and went to bed.
+
+The morning papers did pretty well with what they had. "Mysterious
+Woman Nurses Prominent Varsity Athlete"--"Who Is The Pretty Girl that
+Nursed Society Man in Las Olivas Horror?"--"Modest Heroine of Las
+Olivas Holocaust." But the secret, thanks to Mark Heath, was safe.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+She slept that night. Far along in the morning she awoke to the
+delicious sense of physical renewal. The situation crept into her mind
+stage by stage, as such things do arrive in the awakening
+consciousness. She was calm now, what with her rest of body, her
+decision of soul. She could think it out; her course of action and how
+she might accomplish it.
+
+A knock at her door roused her from half-sleep and meditation to full
+wakening. Kate Waddington had entered--Kate, transformed into a
+picturesque imitation of a nurse. She was all in grass linen, the
+collar rolled away to show her round, golden throat. Her flowing tie
+was blue, and a blue bow completed the knot of her hair. She looked
+cool, efficient, domestically business-like.
+
+"He's better!" Kate burst out with the news as Eleanor turned her
+head. "There's really no danger now. The nurse says that he roused
+this morning and showed a positively vicious temper because they would
+not let him see anyone."
+
+"That's pleasant news. I was sure that he would recover." Eleanor
+caught an unconsidered expression, no more than a glint and a
+drooping, in Kate's eyes. This answer, so calm, so entirely
+unemotional, had touched curiosity if nothing more. But Kate chirped
+on:
+
+"I'm playing Mama's little household fairy--how do you like the way I
+dress the part? I sent for these clothes last night. Now you're to
+lie abed and let me bring you your breakfast. Are you rested, dear? It
+was enough to kill two women!"
+
+"Quite rested, I think."
+
+Kate opened the window, bustled about putting the room to rights.
+
+"Shall I bring your coffee now?" she asked at last.
+
+"Yes, thank you."
+
+Kate was back in ten minutes with table and tray. Whatever she did had
+an individuality, a touch. That tray, for example--nothing could have
+been better conceived to tempt the appetite. She set out the breakfast
+and remained to pour coffee and to talk.
+
+"And isn't it good--mustn't you be thankful--that it won't leave him
+lame or disfigured or anything like that! His shoulder may be weak,
+but what does a man need of shoulders after he's quit football?"
+
+Eleanor just glanced over her coffee-cup, but she made no answer. Kate
+turned her course.
+
+"Won't you let me open your egg for you?"
+
+"No, thank you." Then, "You're very kind, Kate."
+
+"I am the original ray of light. Do let me fix those pillows. You're
+going to lie in bed all the morning, you know. Shall I bring you the
+papers? You should see them! They've got you a heroine."
+
+"Me!" Now Eleanor showed animation.
+
+"Oh, not you. We've all kept the secret well. You're a mystery, a
+pretty shop-girl to the rescue. I hope the weeklies don't find the
+real story."
+
+"I hope so."
+
+Kate rose, made another pretense at setting things right in the room,
+and moved toward the door. A relief, a lowering of tension, came over
+Eleanor. But at the threshold, Kate turned.
+
+"Oh, I nearly forgot! They sent up from Mr. Northrup's office this
+morning for some documents or deeds or something which they thought
+Mr. Chester might have in his pockets. The nurse brought out his
+clothes so that Mrs. Tiffany and I might go through them--I felt like
+a pickpocket. And we came across a package of proofs--photographs of
+him. We opened it to see if the old deeds might be in there. And
+they're such stunning likenesses--Muller, you know--that I thought it
+would do you good to see them."
+
+"Thank you, I should like to."
+
+Kate drew the photographs from her bosom and handed them over. As
+Eleanor took them and began mechanically to inspect them, she caught
+an unconsidered trifle. Kate was not leaving the room. She had stepped
+over to the cheval-mirror, which faced the bed, and was adjusting the
+ribbon in her hair. Looking across the photographs through her lashes,
+Eleanor saw that the counterfeit eyes of Kate in the mirror were
+trained dead upon her.
+
+She examined them, therefore, with indifference; she stopped in the
+middle of her inspection to ask if Judge Tiffany were up yet.
+
+"They're excellent likenesses," she went on indifferently. "That's a
+good composition. I don't care so much for this one. That's a poor
+pose." She had come now to the bottom of the pile. This last print was
+one of those spirited profiles by which Muller, master-photographer,
+so illuminates character.
+
+"Oh, that's a wonder," cried Eleanor. "Such a profile!" Then, at the
+thought how Kate might misinterpret this purely artistic enthusiasm,
+she dropped her voice to indifference again.
+
+"Won't you please tell Aunt Mattie that I will get up if I can be of
+any use?" And she held out the package.
+
+Kate packed up the tray and withdrew. Eleanor heard the muffled tap of
+her heels in the hall. The sound stopped abruptly. It was fully a
+minute before they went on again.
+
+Kate, in fact, had rested the tray on a hall table, drawn out the
+photographs, and run over them, looking at them with all her eyes. The
+profile was at the bottom of the package. When she reached that, she
+hesitated a moment; then, with a quivering motion that ran from her
+fingers over her whole body, she tore it in two. Short as this
+explosion was, her recovery was quicker. She glanced with apprehension
+over her shoulder at the door of Eleanor's room, tucked the
+photographs back in her bosom, and took up the tray again.
+
+Eleanor, when the sound of the tapping heels had quite died away,
+turned her face toward the wall and gave herself to thought. She had
+gathered up the last strand of the tangled web. Nothing was left but
+the unweaving.
+
+First, his soul was not hers, as her soul was not his. That
+impression, received in a crisis which, she felt, was to be the crisis
+of her life, had grown to be an axiom. His youth, his vigor, the pull
+of a stalwart vitality which made his coarseness almost beauty--that
+had been the attraction. His spirit, so blazing but so full of
+flaws--that had been the repulsion.
+
+Did not her own spirit have its flaws? Doubtless. Who was she, then,
+to judge him? Ah, but they did not fit into her flaws!
+
+Kate Waddington now--Eleanor turned her thoughts in that direction
+with difficulty--her flaws were akin to his. Kate could tolerate and
+admire the whole of him. His lapses in finer standards, such as that
+desertion to Northrup--did they not fit like the segments of a broken
+coin with Kate's diplomacies of that very day, her subtle reaching to
+discover if Eleanor were really a rival? Kate would weigh his
+compromises with honor as lightly as he would weigh those pretty
+treacheries. He would be successful; everyone had felt that in him
+from his very first flash on the horizon. Kate would help him to the
+kind of success he wanted. Her tact, her diplomacies, her _flair_ for
+engrafting herself, would be the very best support to his direct
+methods of assault. They belonged to each other; and since now Kate's
+desires in the matter had become manifest, only one thing remained.
+
+All this allowed, what should her own line of conduct be? How should
+she bear herself in the days and weeks when pure human kindness must
+inhibit her from delivering a shock? Would it be necessary to commit
+the inner treason of posing to him as a secret fiancee? Well, that
+must be lived out, step by step. She could at least take all possible
+means, within the bounds of kindness, of withdrawing herself gradually
+from him, of paving the way for the ultimate confession. Kate
+Waddington would help in that. There, her own game and Kate's ran
+parallel.
+
+This discovery of Kate at the end of the tangled strings brought a tug
+at her heart, a black cloud to her spirit. She hated Kate Waddington.
+It made her grip the pillows to think how much she hated. Her mood
+descending into a bitter, morbid jealousy which had no reason for
+being, but which momentarily swept all her resolutions away, sent her
+mind and body whirling back toward Bertram Chester.
+
+That passed. The last trace of her wild animal hatred for Kate
+Waddington was borne away on a prayer of the old faith which held her
+instincts. She rose from her bed in a state of fixed determination
+that never faltered again.
+
+When Eleanor was dressed, she turned not to the front of the house
+where the business of drawing back a life was afoot, but to the fresh
+silences of her garden. She walked to the lattice whose view commanded
+the bay and the distant Gate. It was a quiet, dull-gold morning on the
+Roads. A tug fussed about the quarantine wharf; the lateen
+fisher-boats were slipping out towards the Sacramento. And white and
+stately, between the pillars of the Gate, a full-rigged ship was
+making out to sea on a favoring breeze.
+
+Eleanor watched the sea-birds bending toward it, the mists creeping
+down to cover it. The soul within her leaped toward it and seized it
+as a symbol.
+
+"O ship," she whispered, "take this too away with you! I give it to
+the pure seas. Take this little love away with you!"
+
+That rite, with its poetry and its self-pity, brought exaltation into
+her resolution. The sacrifice was complete.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+Life and spirit came back to Bertram Chester with a sudden bound. By
+the fourth day, he was so much alive, so insistent for company, that
+it became a medical necessity to break the conventional regulations
+for invalids, and let him see people. As it happened, his father was
+the first visitor. Judge Tiffany, who thought of everything, had
+telegraphed on the night of the accident, and had followed this
+dispatch, as Bertram improved, with reassuring messages. Bert Chester
+the elder, it appeared, was off on a long drive into Modoc; two days
+elapsed before his vaqueros, left on the ranch, could reach him.
+
+He arrived with his valise on the morning of that fourth day when
+Bertram roared for company. He was a tall, calm man, with a sea-lion
+mustache, a weather-beaten complexion and the Chester smile in grave
+duplicate. He was obviously uncomfortable in his town clothes; and,
+even at the moment when they were leading him solemnly to the sick
+room, he stepped in awe through the Tiffany splendors. When Mrs.
+Tiffany told him that Bert was doing well, would doubtless recover and
+without disability, he said "That's good!" and never changed
+expression. Mrs. Tiffany, lingering at the door, saw and heard their
+greeting.
+
+"How are you, Bert?" said Chester senior.
+
+"Pretty well, Dad," said Bertram. Then awkwardly, with embarrassed
+self-consciousness of the rite which he was performing, Mr. Chester
+shook his son's hand.
+
+After their short interview, Mr. Chester, a cat--or a bear rather--in
+a strange garret, roamed the Tiffany home and entertained her who
+would listen. He warmed to Kate especially, and that household fairy,
+in her flights between errands of mercy, played him with all the
+prettiness of her coquetry. At luncheon he quite lost his
+embarrassment and responded to the advances of three friendly humans.
+Yes ma-am, he had been glad to learn that Bertram was doing well in
+the city. He had five sons, all doing well. He'd risked letting Bert
+try college, and it had turned out all right. There wasn't much more
+left in the cattle business; but he was an old dog to learn new
+tricks. If he had it to do over again, he'd try fruit in the Santa
+Clara Valley, just like they had done.
+
+As the afternoon wore away bringing its callers, its telephone
+messages and its consultations of doctors, his mood shifted to
+uneasiness. He spent an hour walking back and forth in the garden.
+Just before dinner-time he approached Mrs. Tiffany and Kate, who were
+sewing in the living-room, and said simply:
+
+"Well, I guess I've got to be going."
+
+"Why, we're just getting acquainted!" cried Kate.
+
+Mrs. Tiffany merely flickered an eyelash at the assumption of
+privilege which this implied. But she answered, after a moment, "We
+should like to have you stay. Even at that, don't consider us when it
+is a case of being near your son."
+
+"Well," answered the older Chester, ponderously, "you see it ain't
+like I had only this one son and hadn't been through trouble. There's
+Bob now. I worried quite a lot more than was necessary when the
+Artiguez outfit shot him up, but he pulled through. And after Pete
+got scrambled by a riata, and a few more things of that kind happened,
+I stopped worrying any more than was necessary. He'll get well, and
+you're handling him fine. You've been blame good to the boy," he said;
+and the touch of sentimental softness in his voice showed how genuine
+was his hardly expressed gratitude. He began talking rapidly, as
+though ashamed of it. He hoped they all could come to see him on the
+ranch some time, though there wasn't much there to attract a lady.
+Still, the boys had pretty good times now and then. If the Tiffanys
+liked fresh venison, the boys always got some deer in the season.
+
+"It's lovely down there, I know. Bertram--your son--has told me so
+much about it!" broke in Kate.
+
+"We'd like to see you, too," said Mr. Chester. Then, catching the
+implication, embarrassed by it, he retreated to his room and came back
+in an incredibly short time with his valise. He had turned toward the
+door when Mrs. Tiffany said:
+
+"I think Bertram is well enough so that you might see him again."
+
+"Oh, sure," replied Mr. Chester, as recalling a neglected trifle. He
+dropped his valise and strode back to the sick-room for a short stay.
+
+All that day, Eleanor harbored a dread, which turned toward night to a
+relief--dread of the first interview, relief that Bertram had not sent
+for her. Kate, waiting her chance, slipped secretly into the room
+after Mr. Chester had gone. Bertram was awake. He smiled in a measured
+imitation of his old smile when she entered, and extended his
+uninjured hand. She did not take it; instead, she patted it with her
+cool, long fingers, made to soothe. And considering that the nurse was
+watching, she looked a long time into his eyes.
+
+"They sure smashed me up some," he said. "But I'm a-knitting. How did
+it happen that they swore you in?"
+
+"I wanted to help!"
+
+"That was being pretty good to little Bertie!" He withdrew his hand to
+drop it above hers, and he looked long into her face. "Pretty good to
+little Bertie," he repeated, "and now I want you to be better, and not
+ask any questions about it. Is Miss Gray--Eleanor--about the house?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I thought she might have gone to the ranch. Well, just about
+to-morrow, will you get her in here--alone?"
+
+"Are you ready--to be agitated?"
+
+"Now you don't know what I want--or you wouldn't be asking questions.
+Will you?"
+
+"Yes, Bertram."
+
+"You mustn't talk any more," spoke the nurse from the corner. And Kate
+withdrew.
+
+When, next morning, the two girls met in the hall before breakfast,
+Kate repeated the message simply, carelessly. Eleanor found herself
+struggling to keep face and color. In spite of her long inner
+preparation, the emergency came to her with a sense of surprise. How
+should she carry off this interview? Though her respite had been long,
+though she had thought much, she had no prepared plan of campaign.
+Must she lie for the sake of his bodily health, assume the part which
+she had been playing when he went out of life? Even the question how
+to get rid of the nurse was a tiny embarrassment.
+
+She mustered her voice to say:
+
+"I think I'll look in now. Invalids are likely to be awake at this
+hour of the day."
+
+"Yes, you must be eager!" dabbed Kate.
+
+The nurse was no obstacle. She looked up toward the figure in the
+door, said: "A young lady to see you, Mr. Chester," and withdrew.
+Eleanor stood alone by the foot of the bed, looking into the eyes of
+her problem.
+
+He made no motion. He did not even put out his hand. He regarded her
+with the frown which usually broke into a smile. Now, it continued a
+frown.
+
+"Well, things happened, didn't they?" he said. His voice burst out of
+him with almost its normal force.
+
+"Yes, Bertram. A great deal."
+
+"And I thank you. It was bully work. I don't see how you stood it,
+holding me up the way you did--it ought to have killed off a man, let
+alone a girl. Didn't hurt you anywhere, did it?"
+
+"No--who told you?" Her voice was hard and constrained.
+
+Now Bertram smiled. It was different, this smile, from the old
+illumination of his features. She could not tell, in the moment she
+had to think, whether it was his illness that changed it so, or
+whether it really held a bitterness which, superficially, she read
+into it.
+
+"That's the answer," he said enigmatically. "You didn't know I was
+onto everything, did you? I never went out but once--just after the
+crash when the car turned over. I began to know things while they were
+carrying me up the bank. From that time, I was just like a man with
+his wind knocked out. It didn't hurt much, but I couldn't move a
+finger or a toe. I didn't want to move if I could. I was too busy just
+keeping alive. I couldn't open my eyes, but I heard everything. You
+just bet I heard everything!"
+
+This descent of the conversation into reminiscence and apparent
+commonplace gave Eleanor an opening into which she leaped. It was
+wonderful; she had read of such cases. Had he heard that child crying
+in the corner, and had it bothered him? Had he been conscious that it
+was Mark Heath and none other who was asking so many questions? Mark
+Heath had done so much for them--she would tell him about it some
+other time. But Bertram still lay there with his frown of a petulant
+boy on his face, and her voice ran down into nothing for lack of
+sympathy in her listener.
+
+"Do you remember all you said?" he asked when she was quite silent.
+
+"I think so--why?" The question had brought a little, warm jump of her
+nerves.
+
+"Everything? Something you said to me?"
+
+"I think so, Bertram."
+
+"Did I dream it, then?"
+
+She made no answer to this, but her knees failed under her so that she
+sat down on the bed. Had she--had she said it aloud?
+
+"Something like this: 'Bertram, we don't belong to each other'?" He
+laughed a little on this; even a certain blitheness came into his
+laugh, as though he should say, "the joke is on you."
+
+A sense of the shock she might give him moved her to temporize.
+
+"Let us not talk of it now, Bertram. Let it be as it was until you're
+better."
+
+"I'll be a blame sight better after I get this off my system. You
+see--well I couldn't think just then, but now, when my think tank has
+resumed business, I savvey a heap of things. One is that you weren't
+telling me any news."
+
+"What makes you say that?" Eleanor bent her grave grey eyes on him.
+
+"I had the signal already. I mightn't have seen it fully if this smash
+hadn't come, but just the same I caught it away ahead of you. That
+afternoon up on the Las Olivas trail when we came together. When I
+kissed you."
+
+Had she ever let him kiss her?
+
+He made an incurved gesture of his free hand, as though joining two
+wires.
+
+"It didn't connect. That's all. I was acting on a hunch when I told
+you to keep it dark. Told anyone?"
+
+Not until afterward did she think to be offended by this question. At
+the time, she answered with a simple negative.
+
+"That's good. It is just between us now. I suppose the matter with me
+was that I wanted to fly high, and you were about the highest thing in
+sight--"
+
+"Don't, Bertram. I'm not high. Am I hurting you? Oh, am I unkind when
+you are ill?"
+
+"Oh, if you think it's hurting me, you're off. This is a swell way to
+talk, isn't it, considering that I'm here--" his eyes swept the
+aristocratic comforts of the Tiffany spare room.
+
+"We mustn't think of that. It's too big to think of that!"
+
+"I guess you're right. Now that is finished, going to forgive me
+because I walked over to Northrup?"
+
+"I've nothing of any kind to forgive. It's you, I think, that must
+forgive."
+
+"Oh, it's all square, everything's all square. I want to be good
+friends with you if you'll let me. I hope," his voice was almost
+tender, "you connect with the right man. He won't have any too much
+blood in his neck, but he'll have a lot of general culture in his
+system."
+
+Here she realized that she had something to forgive. She repeated,
+mentally, her act of renunciation as she said:
+
+"You're a great, strong, generous man. I can't tell you how much I
+thank you for the course you've taken to-day. You're going to succeed
+and--some woman--is going to be proud of you." She had avoided by a
+thread naming the woman. "I shall be glad I knew you, and I shall be
+your friend as long as you'll let me."
+
+He smiled his old smile and his uninjured hand went out.
+
+"Shake!" he said.
+
+Yet it was a relief that the nurse came back and said quietly, "You've
+talked enough." As she walked to the door, Eleanor found that her will
+was focused on the operation of her feet, commanding them to move with
+decent slowness. Had she obeyed her impulse, she should have run. She
+forced herself to turn at the door and smile back, forced herself to
+bridle her emotions and go quietly to breakfast and to her ordeal with
+the lightning thrusts of Kate Waddington.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two days later, Eleanor followed Judge Tiffany to the ranch. A
+perplexing fruit season brought her fair excuse. The year before, the
+Japanese, adventurers in minor labors, had begun to flood the Santa
+Lucia tract. They drove out the Chinese; when that spring brought
+picking contracts, no Oriental was to be had save a Japanese. In the
+first rush of that season, the Japanese pickers on the Tiffany ranch,
+in concert with all the other Japanese of Santa Lucia, had thrown down
+their baskets, repudiated their agreements, and struck. It needed more
+than Judge Tiffany's failing strength, more than Olsen's methodical
+plodding, to conquer this situation.
+
+She must be a post now, not a rail, Eleanor told Mrs. Tiffany. And
+Kate would help until Mr. Chester could be moved. At further
+acceptance of Kate, Mrs. Tiffany rebelled. Kate had foisted herself on
+them. Goodness knew, Mrs. Tiffany couldn't tell why they had ever
+accepted that situation. It didn't seem to her even decent.
+
+"You'll perplex me greatly, dear Aunt Mattie, if you don't let her
+remain now!" said Eleanor, looking up from her packing.
+
+This remark, cryptic though it was, came as a fresh shower to Mrs.
+Tiffany's curiosity. Never before had Eleanor so nearly committed
+herself on the subject which lay like lead on her aunt's
+responsibilities. It prompted Mrs. Tiffany to try for a wider
+opening.
+
+"Would you like it, dear, if we brought Mr. Chester down to the ranch
+to recuperate when he is better? I'm sure Edward wouldn't object.
+After all, he's ready to forgive the Northrup affair."
+
+Eleanor looked up significantly.
+
+"If you're consulting my wishes, certainly not!" she said.
+
+The sigh which Mrs. Tiffany drew expressed deep relief. Thereafter,
+they proceeded straight ahead with the arrangement. Eleanor went on to
+the ranch. Kate, remaining, made herself so useful in a hundred ways
+that Mrs. Tiffany's irritation wore itself away.
+
+The old combination of Eleanor and an attractive though undesirable
+young man had moved her to a perilous sympathy. Now that it was over,
+now that she had no more responsibility in the matter, she transferred
+some of that vivid and friendly interest to the new arrangement. She
+caught herself resisting a temptation to spy on their conversations;
+she watched Kate's face for tell-tale expression whenever Bertram's
+name came up in their luncheon-time chats.
+
+Kate usurped all the finer prerogatives of the nurse. Hers it was to
+arrange the sick-room, to put finishing touches on bed and table, to
+feed him at his meals. Her tawny hair made sunshine in the chamber,
+her cool hands, in their ministration, had the caress of breezes. He
+was getting to be an impatient invalid; he bore the confinement harder
+than he did the ache of knitting bones. Kate's part it was to laugh
+away these irritations, so that she always left him smiling.
+
+He went on mending until they could get him out of bed; until, on an
+afternoon when the sun was bright and the wind was low, they could
+take him into the garden for a breath of air and view. He made the
+journey out-of-doors with Kate supporting him unnecessarily by the
+armpit. She set out a Morris chair for him by the lattice, so that he
+could overlook the Bay, she tucked the robes about him, she parted the
+vines that he might have better view.
+
+For a moment he swept the bay with his eyes and opened his lungs to
+the out-door room and air. Then his gaze returned to Kate's strong,
+vigorous yet feminine back, as she stood, arms outstretched, hooking
+vines on the trellis. The misty sunshine was making jewels in her
+hair.
+
+"Say!" He spoke so suddenly and with such meaning in the monosyllable
+that Kate blushed as she turned. "Say! is that fellow still writing to
+you--the one with the Eastern education and the money?"
+
+Kate dropped her eyes.
+
+"No," she said softly. "I told him--I have broken it off--lately."
+
+Bertram laughed--his old, fresh laugh of a boy.
+
+"You saved me trouble then. I was just about to serve notice on him
+that henceforth no one but little Bertie was going to be allowed on
+this ranch."
+
+Kate did not speak. She continued to look down at the gravel walk.
+
+"Now don't you go pretending you don't know what I mean," Bertram went
+on. "Just for that, I won't tell you what I mean. But you know."
+
+"What about Eleanor?" murmured Kate.
+
+"You little devil!" answered Bertram. "Come over here."
+
+Kate sank down on the edge of his chair, and dropped one arm about his
+neck.
+
+Mrs. Tiffany, viewing the morning from the window of her room, saw
+them so. At first, she smiled; then a heavier expression drew down
+all the lines of her face. She crossed to her dresser, where a long
+frame of many divisions held the photographs of all whom she had
+loved. The first in order was of a woman who had a face like
+Eleanor's; a more beautiful Eleanor, perhaps, but with no such grave
+light of the spirit in her eyes. This she touched with her finger
+tips. But her look was bent upon the second, the portrait of a young
+man whose attitude, defying the conventional pose of old-fashioned
+photography, showed how blithe and merry and full of life he must have
+been.
+
+"Ah, Billy Gray!" she whispered, "Billy Gray, you know, _you_, how
+sincerely Eleanor and I ought to thank God!"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Readjustment, by Will Irwin
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