u'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