r black cigarettes and chattered in their heavy, peasant
accent.

Within, Madame Loisel ruled with her cash register at the cigar
counter. She, bursting with sweet inner fatness like a California
nectarine, kept in her middle age the everlasting charm and chic of
the Frenchwoman. This Madame Loisel was a dual personality. She of the
grave mouth, the considering eye, the business manner, who rung up
dinner fees on the cash register and bargained with the Chinamen for
vegetables at the back door, seemed hardly even sister to the Madame
Loisel of Saturday afternoon on "the line" or Sunday morning at the
French Church. By what process man may not imagine, this second Madame
Loisel took six inches from her girth, fifty pounds from her weight,
fifteen years from her age. Her step was like a dancer's; her figure
was no more than comfortably plump; her Sunday complexion brought the
best out of her alluring eyes and her black, ungrizzled hair; her
hands, in their perfect gloves, bore no resemblance to the hands which
had scraped pots for Louis Loisel in the time before he could flaunt
the luxury of a cashier.

In Madame Loisel's background lay the ramblings of a house built for
comfort and large hospitalities. Gone were the folding doors, bare
the niches, empty the window-seats. The old drawing-rooms, music-room,
dining-room, had become one apartment of a sanded floor and many long
tables. Through this background of his wife moved Louis Loisel,
grizzled, fat and gay; never too busy at his serving to exchange
flamboyant banter with a patron.

Hither the peasant French of San Francisco, menials most of them, came
for luncheons and dinners of thick, heavy vegetable soup, coarse fish,
boiled joint, third-class fruit and home-made claret, vinted by Louis
himself in a hand press during those September days when the Latin
quarter ran purple--and all for fifteen cents! Thither, too, came
young apprentices of the professions, working at wages to shame a
laborer, who had learned how much more one got for his money at
Louis's than at the white-tiled American places further down town. It
stood for ten years, this Hotel Marseillaise, the hope of the
impecunious. How many careers did it preserve, how many old failures
from the wreckage of Kearney Street did it console!

Madame Loisel stood at her cash register as the two young men entered.
A fresh waist, a ribbon at her throat, a slimness of her waist and an
artificial freshness in her c