ed 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 re