But if I'd been like this boy! He'll seize the thing before him.
No side considerations in his mind!"

"It is a policy," said Mrs. Tiffany in a tone of injured
partisanship, "that will land him in jail."

"No," said the Judge, "success does not lead towards jails. He'll look
out for that."

CHAPTER III

In that immortal "middle period" of San-Francisco, when the gay mining
camp was building toward a stable adjustment of society, when the
wild, the merry, the dissolute and the brave who built the city were
settling down to found houses and cultivate respectability in face of
a constantly resurgent past--in those days none who pretended to
eminence in the city but knew the sisters Sturtevant. Members of that
aristocracy which dwelt on Rincon Hill, their names and fames quite
eclipsed those of their quiet, self-effacing parents. Although they
never called it that, their establishment amounted to a salon. Also,
they never called their circle Bohemian, yet it was tinged with an
easy view on the conventionalities, a leaning toward art and the
things of art, which meant Bohemia in the time when that word was of
good repute. Spain, perpetual spring, the flare of adventure in the
blood, the impulse of men who packed Virgil with their bean-bags on
the Overland journey, conspired already to make San Francisco a city
of artists. She had developed her two poets, singers whose notes had
sounded round the world; the painters had followed. The stir of a new
life in art, a life which was never quite to reach fulfilment, blew in
the bay air.

Centre for those awakening young painters, those minor poets who
carried in weaker hands the torches of the two giant pioneers, was the
house of the Sturtevant sisters, the one a wit, the other a beauty.
Heaven was not grudging with gifts to these two. Alice, the wit, had
also a hidden kind of beauty which was not to be taken in on first
sight, but which, perceived by the painters of that set, made some of
them swear that she was the real beauty of the two. Matilda, the
beauty, had if not wit a sprightly feminine fancy. Then, too, her
gentleness of judgment, her sweetness of intention, and her illogic of
loyalty, gave her point of view a humorous quality. Her circle,
confident in her good-nature, was forever leading her on, by this
device or that, to exhibit what John Stallard, the novelist, called
her "comedy of charity." O'Ryan, that great, glowing failure whose
name will outlive t