ywhere
that a man has more license to get crazy over. You're a beauty and
you're just about the best fellow I know."

"I suppose you _had_ to say that!"

"I figure that I wanted to. If I haven't said it before, it's
because--" he stopped; Kate, as though it were an actual presence,
could see the figure of Eleanor rising between them.

"Yes, I know--" she said quickly. "You do think I'm attractive
then--cross your heart."

"Cross my heart, you're a beaut."

"But that doesn't get me any further with my troubles."

"What are his bad points that make you hold off?"

"Nothing more than a feeling, I suppose. No, it's more than
that--something definite. It's--I find this thing hard to say. Not
exactly weakness in him--more a lack of proved strength. He inherited
his money; he's had the regular Eastern education. He's at work,
managing his properties. But I'd feel so much more secure of his
strength if he had made it for himself. That is the thing I could
admire most in a man; more even than kindness. To have him succeed
from nothing because his strength was in it. I don't care how
unfinished he might be--that would show he was a man!"

Bertram was still pausing on this, when Kate touched his arm.

"I'm afraid," she said, "that we must join the others. They'll be
talking about us if we don't, and we mustn't have that--for Eleanor's
sake if for no other!" They hurried ahead, therefore, and walked
beside Mr. and Mrs. Masters all the way in.

At the studio door, Kate declined a half-accepted invitation to remain
for the night.

"Mother isn't wholly well," she said, "and I can be fearfully domestic
in emergency! It's only a step to the Valencia Street cars, and Mr.
Bertram will get me home."

It was still too early for the theatre crowd; they found themselves
alone on the outer seat of a "dummy" car, one of those rapid transit
conveyances by which San Francisco of old let the passenger decide
whether that amorphic climate was summer or winter.

He had, it seemed, to shake her back into the story of her
love-affair. Three times he approached the subject, and each time she
fended it off. They had passed clear into the Mission, were more than
three-quarters of the way home, before he launched one of his frontal
assaults.

"You might give me some more work at my job of confidant," he said.

She began again, then; a story without detail; more a sentimental
exposure of her feelings. The thing was growing like a canker