ou try something in business instead of sticking to newspapers?
Let's go in together. Reporting is a rotten kind of business."

"Oh, I don't know, I like it. I think I'll stay with it for a while."
Again Mark had put back the thought of his heart. Like so many of the
loyal and devoted, he could hardly bring himself to speak of his own
deeper motives and ambitions. Least of all could he reveal them in
this moment of disillusion. He had never told Bertram about the
four-act comedy hidden in the writing desk of their common room, to be
mulled over during the mornings of his leisure. "I think I'll stay
with it for a while, anyway," he added simply.

They had turned out of Kearney Street and were mounting the hill-rise
toward the Hotel Marseillaise. These fringes and environments of
Chinatown had been residences for the newly affluent in the days when
the Poodle Dog flourished and flaunted in the hull of a wreck, in the
days when that Chinatown site was Rialto and Market-place for the
overgrown mining camp. The wall moss which blew in with the trade
winds, and the semi-tropic growth of old ivies and rose-bushes, had
given to these houses the seasoning of two centuries. Unpretentious
hovels beside the structures of stone turrets and mill-work fronts by
which later millionaires shamed California Street and Van Ness Avenue,
they had the simple dignity of a mission, a colonial farm-house, or
any other structure wherein love of craft has supplanted scanty
materials. Innumerable additions of sheds and boxes, the increment of
their fallen social condition, broke their severe lines. A massive
door, a carriage entrance, the remains of a balcony faced to catch
wind and air of the great bay, recalled what they had been; as though
a washerwoman should wear on her tattered waist some jewel of a wealth
long past.

The Hotel Marseillaise occupied one of these houses. Where it stood,
the hill rose steep. One might enter a narrow alley, skirt a board
fence, dodge into a box hall, seasoned with dinners long past, and
mount by a steep staircase to the dining room; or he might enter that
dining room directly from the street, such was the slope of the hill.
A row of benches parked the front door. On the fine, out-of-doors
evenings which came too seldom in the City of Fogs, French waiters out
of work, French deserters from merchantmen in the harbor below, French
cabmen waiting for night and fares, lolled on these benches while they
smoked thei