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
beg