staurant 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 arr