politans 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 el