three-year-old at a little
table in a corner, nodded a welcome, and a young Frenchwoman, putting
her head in through a swinging door at the back, nodded, too, and said,
showing a double row of white teeth:

"Wait--een?"

"Yes, we'll wait for the others!" Connie called back. She and Julia
nibbled French bread, and played with their knives and forks while they
waited.

The dining-room had that aspect of having been made for domestic and
adapted to general use that is so typically un-American, yet so dear to
the American heart. An American manager would have torn down partitions,
papered in brown cartridge, curtained in pongee, and laid a hardwood
floor. Monsieur Montiverte left the two drawing-rooms as they were: a
shabby red carpet was under foot, stiff Nottingham curtains filtered the
bright sunlight, and an old-fashioned paper in dull arabesques of green
and brown and gold made a background for framed dark engravings,
"Franklin at the Court of France," and "The Stag at Bay," and other
pictures of their type. The tablecloths were coarse, the china and glass
heavy, and the menus were written in blue indelible pencil, in a curly
French hand. From the windows at the back one could look out upon an
iron-railed balcony, a garden beyond, and the old, brick, balconied
houses of the Chinese quarter. At the left the California Street cable
car climbed the hill, and the bell tower of old St. Mary's rose sombre
and dignified against the soft sunset sky. At the right were the Park,
with a home-going tide pouring through it at this hour, and Kearney
Street with its jangling car bells, and below, the square roofs of the
warehouse district, and the spire of the ferry building, and the bay
framed in its rim of hills. Montiverte owned the house in which he
conducted his business; it was one of the oldest in the city, built by
the French pioneers who were the first to erect permanent homes in the
new land. This had been the fashionable part of town in 1860, but its
stately old homes were put to strange uses in these days.
Boarding-houses of the lowest class, shops, laundries, saloons, and such
restaurants as Jules Montiverte's overran the district; the Chinese
quarter pressed hard upon one side, and what was always called the "bad"
part of town upon the other. Yet only two blocks away, straight up the
hill, were some of San Francisco's most beautiful homes, the brownstone
mansion, then the only one in California, that some homesick Ea