studio. The intellectual centre of San Francisco shifted to that
garret; the gay, the witty and the brilliant still followed wherever
Alice Gray might go. Billy, a type of the journalist in the time when
journalism meant the careless life, left her a great deal alone after
the honeymoon. On his side, there was no conscious neglect in this; on
her side, there was no reproach. It was just their way of living. He
adored her with a quiet, steady flame of affection which was too fine
to degenerate into mere uxoriousness. Already, he was a little too
fond of his liquor--a peccadillo which attracted little attention in
that age of the careless city. This troubled Alice Gray less than it
would have troubled her mother. In the periods when she pulled herself
up, she worried to think how little she did care about it. In fact,
his remorseful recovery from his debauches had become her occasion for
pouring out upon him the mother in her. She reveled guiltily in this
singular sacrament of her singular love.

After three years Alice Gray gave birth to a daughter--and died within
a fortnight afterward. In all truth, I may say that life, for Billy
Gray, ended that day. To lose this tenth muse--I can think of nothing
more complete in tragedy except the loss of her father of Marjorie
Fleming. And he, like Marjorie Fleming's father, spoke her name no
more--until near the end. When after twenty years, his own time came,
Stallard, LeBrun the poet and Lars Wark gathered to pay him their last
respects. LeBrun came all the way from New Orleans, and Stallard
delayed his journey to the South Seas. They had drifted away from him,
such had become his ways and habits; they came back in honor of the
woman who illuminated their youth. So long and so powerful was the
influence of her who never wrote a line except in air and memory.

Billy Gray went on living for the sake of his daughter; but he lived
like a man driven of the furies. He became one of those restless,
wandering journalists whose virtue to their newspapers is their utter
abandonment of courage and enterprise, whose defect is their love of
drink.

Eleanor, they called the baby--Alice had chosen that name "in case it
is a girl." Mrs. Tiffany, childless herself, played second mother
during the first three years of Eleanor's healthy and contented little
life. Perceiving the growth of bad habits in that broken
brother-in-law, strong and generous enough to face her perceptions,
she called him