The Tiffany house—I spare you full description—rambled with many a balcony and addition over that hill which rose like a citadel above San Francisco. From its Southern windows, one looked clean over the city, lying outspread below. Even the Call building, highest eminence piled up by man in that vista, presented its roof to the eye. I can picture that site no better than by this; Over Judge Tiffany’s front wall hung an apple tree, gnarled, convoluted, by the buffets of the sea wind. In autumn, when the fruit was ripe, stray apples from this tree had been seen to tumble from the wall and roll four blocks down into the Latin quarter.

From the rear, the house looked out on a hedged and sloping garden, quite old, as gardens go in that land, for a pioneer planted it; and from the rear gate of that garden it was only a step to the hill mount. Thence one came out suddenly to the panorama of the 98 Bay, stretching on three sides; a panorama divided, as by the false panels of a mural landscape, into three equal marvels. To left, the narrow gate, a surge like the rush of a river always in its teeth and the bright ocean, colored like smelt-scales, beyond. In front the Roads, where all strange crafts from the mysterious Pacific anchored while they waited their turns at the docks. Both in foreground and background, this panel changed day by day. It might be whalers from the Arctic which lay there in the morning, their oils making noisome the breeze; it might be a fleet of beaten, battered tramp wind-jammers, panting after their fight about the Horn; it might be brigs from the South Seas; it might be Pacific steamers, Benicia scow-schooners, Italian fishing smacks, Chinese junks—it might be any and all of these together. As for the background, that changed not every day but every hour what with the shifts of wind, tide and mists. Now its tinge was a green-gold betraying pollution of those mountain placers which fed the San Joaquin and the mighty Sacramento. Now it was blue and ruffled, now black and calm, now slate-gray,—a mysterious shade this last, so that when the 99 fog began to shoot lances across the waters, these fleets at anchor by Quarantine wharf seemed argosies of fairy adventure. Even Tamalpais, the gentle mountain which rose beyond everything, changed ever with the change in her veil of mist or fog or rain-rift. The third panel, lying far to the right, showed first dim mountain ranges and the mouths of mighty rivers, and then, nearer by, masts, stacks and shipping, fringing the city roofs.

North into this garden ran a small wing of the Tiffany house. Upon the death of Alice Gray, Mattie Tiffany had set it apart for Eleanor the baby. When, after her years with Billy Gray, Eleanor came back, Mattie had refurnished it for the grown baby. The upper story held her bedroom and her closets. Below was her own particular living-room. This opened by a vine-bordered door into the garden, into that path which led up to the bay view.

Judge Tiffany, sitting within the front window to watch the shimmer of a pleasant Sunday afternoon on the city roofs below, perceived that his wife had walked three times to that garden wall which looked down along 100 the drop of Broadway to the Spanish Church.

The second time that he perceived this phenomenon, his eyes showed interest; the third he smiled with inner satisfaction and rose to meet her return as though by accident. He was leaning upon a cane, getting ease of the sciatica which plagued him.

The Judge had aged during the two years since he opened these events. He had settled now into the worldly state of a man who rests content with the warming sun and the bright air which feed life. But the inner soul, whose depth was his philosophy, whose surface his whimsical humor—that still burned in his dark blue eyes. Those eyes glistened a little as he went on to this, his daily sport.

He met her on the piazza. She had raked the rise of Broadway, which one mounted by two blocks of hen-coop sidewalks; and now she was inspecting the cross street.

“All the Sherlock Holmes in me,” said Judge Tiffany, “tells me that Miss Eleanor Gray is going to have a caller, and that Mrs. Edward C. Tiffany is in a state of vicarious perturbation.

“Further,” continued Judge Tiffany, dropping his hand upon her arm with that affectionate 101 gesture which drew all sting his words might have carried, “this is no common caller. For that young civil engineer and Mr. Perham the painter and Ned Greene, Mrs. Tiffany never blushes; but these new attentions to her niece—well, I hope my approach drew as much blood from her heart to her countenance twenty-five years ago!”

“I—I am perturbed,” said Mattie Tiffany. Running rose-bushes, just leafing out into their fall greenery, overgrew the pillars beside her. These she fell to pruning with her hands, so that she turned away her face.

“I see that discipline is relaxing in this family,” said Judge Tiffany. “Dear, dear, after managing a wife bravely and well for a quarter century, to fail in one’s age! Mattie, he works in my office, this blush-compelling caller; and I told you when I gave him the position not to take him up socially for the present!”

“But what was I to do when he telephoned to Eleanor and asked her?” Mrs. Tiffany turned her head with a turn of her thought. “Did you hear him telephone—was that how you knew?” 102

“I’d lose all hold on discipline if I revealed my methods.”

Judge Tiffany settled himself in an armchair as one prepared to make it a long session. “Let’s begin at the start. How came he to renew his acquaintance with Eleanor, and when, and where—and how much had Mattie Tiffany to do with bringing them together again?”

“Not a thing—truly Edward! Some of Eleanor’s slumming with Kate Waddington and the Masters—they met by accident at a restaurant—Eleanor asked him. You remember he was taken with her that afternoon just before she went to Europe—the time he mortified me so dreadfully.”

“And the time he attracted my attention,” said Judge Tiffany. “And now behold that youth, who will always get what he wants by frontal attack, reading my California cases and wearing out my desk with his feet.”

“Do you think he will make a good lawyer?” asked Mattie Tiffany. She turned full around at this, and the glance she threw into her husband’s face showed more than a casual matchmaker’s interest.

“He’ll make a good something,” said the 103 Judge. “So far as anyone can judge the race from the start. But that isn’t why I have him in the office. You know how little I care in these days for such practice as I have left. I tell myself, of course, that it is my lingering interest in life as a general proposition which made me do it—I am curious to see before I die how this find of yours is coming out. That is what I tell myself. Probably in my very inside heart I know that it’s something else.”

“What else?” asked Mattie.

“This is one of the hidden things which this experiment is to discover,” said Judge Tiffany. “What made me notice him in the first place? What made you invite him to tea on the lawn? What has made you and me and Eleanor remember this chance meeting so long—let me see—how long was it?”

“A year ago last June,” said Mattie. One of her functions in their partnership was to hold small details always ready to the hand of the wide-thinking Judge.

“Will he go back on me—that’s the question,” pursued the Judge. “Success is probably at the end for him, but he has two ways of success open. He may go slowly and well, 104 or fast and ill. Road number one: he stays with my moth-eaten old practice, he refurbishes it, he earns a partnership; and so to conservative clients and, probably, to genuine success.” He hesitated.

“And the other road?” asked Mrs. Tiffany.

“Oh, that has many by-paths. He is trying one of them already. The stealthy, invaluable Attwood has told me about it. This Mr. Chester has made an investment in Richmond lots on information which he had no right to use. Never mind the details. If he follows that general direction, it will be a flashy success, a pretty worm-eaten crown of laurels.”

“Like Northrup’s,” broke in Mrs. Tiffany. That name always jarred on their ears. Northrup, ex-congressman, flowery Western orator, all Christian love on the surface, all guile beneath—he had taken to himself that success which Judge Tiffany might have had but for his hesitations of conscience. Theirs was a secret resentment. Judge Tiffany’s pride would never have let him show the world one glimmer of what he felt.

“Suppose he should follow that path—and take up with Northrup,” went on Judge Tiffany. “Mine honorable opponent has use for 105 such young men as our Mr. Chester will prove himself if he follows that path—magnetic young men to coax the rabble, young men not too nice on moral questions. Well, a boy isn’t born with honor, any more than he’s born with courage; he grows to it. And God only knows just when the boy strikes the divide which will turn his course one way or the other.”

“But Edward, you ought to warn him!”

“In the first place, it would do no good to warn one of his age and temperament. In the second place, it would spoil the experiment—but I had commanded you to talk, and here I am doing it all. How looked she; what said he?”

“To-day—just before church—I was hooking up Kate and Eleanor, and he telephoned.”

“Instinct, of course, informing you that it was none other than he at the other end of the wire?” On another tongue and in another fashion of speech, this sentence might have been offensive; between them, it was a part of his perpetual game with her amiable weaknesses.

“If I did listen, it was no more than right. 106 It was what a mother would have done by Eleanor. I heard her say, ‘Good morning Mr. Chester,’ not at all as though she were surprised to have him call up; and I was really quite disturbed. You had told me not to invite him here for the present; and I hadn’t the slightest reason for knowing that Eleanor had seen him since she came back from abroad. Her speaking so familiarly—well, I wondered. But Kate—”

“Oh, she was listening too?”

“Well, I know that she hadn’t the excuse for listening that I had; but I had stopped hooking her up, and it was only natural that she should listen too. Eleanor said, ‘Certainly I shall be in,’ and Kate said, ‘That’s the old friend we met with Mr. Masters last night in the Hotel Marseillaise. He is prompt!’ Rather sharp in Kate, considering what Eleanor has been doing for her!

“You’d have thought Eleanor had eaten the canary bird when she came back. Of course, she knew we had been listening. I wish she hadn’t. I’d have liked to see whether she’d have told us then, or waited for him to surprise us. Kate was sharp again. I wonder 107 if she isn’t envious at bottom? After all Eleanor is so much more a lady! Kate said again, ‘The young man is prompt!’”

Judge Tiffany laughed.

“Oh, that women could dwell together in peace and harmony! Can’t you grant my playmate Miss Waddington a feminine jab or two?”

“Well, she is nice to you!”

“Did it never occur to you as a virtue in her that she puts herself out to entertain—even, Madame, I flatter myself to fancy—a withered old codger like me!”

Mrs. Tiffany’s first expression flooded her eyes and said, “Is there anything strange in liking you?” Her second expression set her mouth hard and said, “What is her object?” Her voice said nothing.

“And behold him now,” said Judge Tiffany.

There, indeed, came Bertram Chester, visible over their garden wall as he toiled up the hen-coop sidewalk. The Judge returned to the house; Mattie Tiffany settled herself on the piazza with the preen and flutter of a female thing about to be wooed. 108

The Tiffany drawing-room, panelled simply in woods, furnished with the old Sturtevant mahogany, came upon Bertram Chester like a stage setting as he entered with Mrs. Tiffany. Upstage, burned a driftwood fire in a low hearth of rough bricks; Judge Tiffany sat there, in a spindle-backed chair, reading. Across a space broken only by a painting, a Japanese print or so, and more spindle-backed chairs, Eleanor and Kate had grouped themselves by the piano. Eleanor, turning the leaves on the music-rack, looked over her shoulder at him. She was in pink that day; the tint of her gown, blending into the tint of her fresh skin, contrasted magically with the subdued background. Kate, all in white, sat on a hassock pulling a volume from the low book shelf. All this came upon Bertram with a soothing sense which he did not understand in that stage of his development, did not even formulate.

Kate, tripping across the rugs with a lightness which perfectly balanced her weight, greeted him first; Eleanor and Judge Tiffany shook hands with more reserve. And as Bertram settled himself in an arm-chair before the fire, it was the ready Kate who put 109 him at his ease by opening fire of conversation.

“Did I tell you, Mrs. Tiffany, about the restaurant which Mr. Chester found for us last night? such an evening he gave us! Mr. Chester, who is Madame Loisel—you should have seen her, Judge Tiffany—you’d never dine at home again. When these young charms fade, I’m going to marry a French restaurant-keeper and play hostess to the multitude and be just plump and precious like her. How can you ever get past the counter with her behind it, Mr. Chester?”

“I’m generally hungry—that’s how!” said Bertram Chester.

“That’s man for you!” responded Kate. “Judge beloved, if you were a young man and Eleanor—I’m too modest to mention myself, you see—were what she’ll be at forty, and she were behind a counter, and you before it, would hunger tear you away? Oh dear, it’s such a bore to keep one’s grammar straight!”

“I ask my wife’s permission before giving the answer which is in my heart,” said Judge Tiffany.

Eleanor broke into the laugh which followed. 110

“But I would like to know about Madame Loisel.”

“Well, she’s certainly a ripe pippin; you’ve seen that,” answered Bertram, his smile on Eleanor. “And I’d like to know what she’s saying when she parleys French to the garçons. She’s all right if she’s feeling right, but I’ve seen her tear the place up when the service went bad. I guess she’s a square and a pretty good fellow!”

“Tell us more about her—” this from Eleanor.

“About her squareness? Well, there was the time Gentle Willie Purdy got drunk. We call him Gentle Willie because he isn’t, you know. About three o’clock in the morning, he took the notion it was dinner time and climbed the side gate to the Hotel Marseillaise and pounded at the door. He faded out about then, he says. When he woke up, he was laid out on a couch, with a towel on his head, and Madame was bringing him black coffee. He tried to thank her after he felt better; and what do you think she said? ‘Meester Purdy, nevaire, nevaire come to eat in thees place again.’ She stayed with it too!” 111

“Good for her!” said Mrs. Tiffany, reaching for her crewel work.

“Oh, yes,” responded Mr. Chester in the uncertain tone of one who gives assent for politeness without knowing exactly why.

“If I ever depart from the straight and narrow paths and get drunk, may I have Madame Loisel to hold my head,” cried Kate.

The talk ran, then, into conventional channels—the news, the latest novel, and the season’s picking at the ranch. Judge Tiffany dropped out gradually, and resumed his book; and more and more did Bertram direct his talk, salted and seasoned with his magnetism, toward Eleanor. Kate Waddington, left out of the conversation through three or four exchanges, crossed the room and draped herself on a hassock at the feet of Judge Tiffany.

“Judge darling,” she said in an aside which penetrated to the furthest corner of the room, “I’m going back to my unsympathetic home before tea. Don’t you think we’re well enough chaperoned to go on with our flirtation just where we left off?”

“Where was I when we were interrupted?” asked Judge Tiffany, leaning forward. 112

“Twenty-fourth page, fifth chapter,” said Kate. “I was just getting you jealous and you were trying not to show it. Mr. Chester—oh excuse me—well, I’ve broken in now, so I might as well get the reward of my impoliteness—may I use you to make Judge Tiffany jealous?”

“Sure you can!” answered Bertram.

“Oh, he won’t do at all!” Kate was addressing Judge Tiffany again. “He’s entirely too eager. Who would be a good rival anyway, Judge adored? Let’s create one, like the picture of your future husband in a nickel vaudeville!”

“Eleanor,” spoke Mrs. Tiffany, “suppose you show Mr. Chester your end of the house and our garden—or would you like it, Mr. Chester? We’re rather proud of the garden.”

“I’d like it,” answered Bertram; and he rose instantly. Mrs. Tiffany made no move to accompany them; she sat bent over her yarns, her ears open. And she noticed, at the moment when Bertram made that abrupt movement from his chair, how Kate hesitated in the middle of a sentence, as though confused. 113

The rehearsed flirtation between Kate and Judge Tiffany faded into a game of jackstones on the floor.

Mrs. Tiffany heard the double footsteps fade down the hall, heard the garden door open and close. After a short interval, she heard the door again, and the dim footsteps sounded for but a moment. They had turned, evidently, into Eleanor’s own living room. Would they stop there, these two, for a talk—yes, her gentle treble, his booming bass, drifted down the hall. Presently Mrs. Tiffany heard Eleanor’s laugh, followed by his. In that instant, she looked at the jackstone players by the hearth. Kate, on the crackle of that laugh, had arrested all motion. A jack which she had tossed in the air, descended with no hand to stop it. For a moment, Kate held that intent pose; then,

“Judge wonderful, I’m a paralytic at times. You for twosies.” She swept the jacks towards him with one of her characteristic gestures, free and yet deft.

A bell rang in the outer hall, and the maid entered.

“Miss Waddington is wanted at the telephone,” she announced. 114

Eleanor, when she saw that her visitor had no intention of rejoining the party, commanded him to smoke. He rolled a cigarette, Western fashion, from powdered tobacco and brown paper, and disposed himself in the window-seat, one leg drawn up under him, his big shoulders settled comfortably against the wall. Eleanor began to talk fluently, superficially, with animation. She felt from the first that he was throwing himself against her barriers, trying to reach at once the deeper stages of acquaintance. His direct look seemed both to plead and to command. She outwitted two or three flanking movements before he took advantage of a pause and charged her entrenchments direct.

“I’ve said it before, but I’m going to keep on. You are pretty.”

“Thank you,” she replied; and smiled—mainly at the ingenuousness of this, although partly at the contrast between her present view of him and that old memory.

“Oh, it never seems to bother you when I say that,” went on Bert Chester, bending his rather large and compelling black-brown eyes upon her. “Some girls would get sore, and some would like it; you never pay any attention. 115 That’s one of the ways you’re different.”

(“Heavens—is he making love already—he is sudden!” thought Eleanor with amusement.)

“You are, you know. I picked you for different the first time I saw you. I wondered then if you were beautiful—I always knew you had nice eyes—and it isn’t so much that you’ve changed, as that the longer a man looks at you the prettier you are.”

“Shall we discuss other things than me?” asked Eleanor.

“Why shouldn’t we talk about you? I’ve never had a chance before—just think, it’s the first time ever I saw you alone—even that time on the ranch a bull chaperoned us!” This minor joke, like every play of his spirit, gained a hundred times its own inherent effect by sifting through his personality. She smiled back to his smile at the boyish ripples about his mouth and eyes.

“You see, it means a lot when a girl sticks in a man’s mind that way,” he continued. “Why, I’ve carried you around right through my Senior year at college and my first year out. So of course, it must mean something.” 116

The open windows of Eleanor’s bower looked out upon a bay tree, a little thing awaiting its slaughter—for shade trees might not grow too near the windows in San Francisco. It was flopping its lance-leaves against the panes; puffs of the breeze brought in a suggestion of its pungency. That magic sense, so closely united with memory—it brought back a faint impression upon her. Her very panic at this ghost of old imaginations inspired the inquiry, barbed and shafted with secret malice:

“How many really nice girls have you known in that time?”

Bertram, sitting in considerable comfort on the window seat, flashed his eyes across his shoulder to her.

“Oh, a few in my Senior year, not many this year. What’s a man going to do on twelve a week?” She noticed the indelicacy of this, since he spoke in the house of his employer. But the next sentence from him was even more startling:

“The last time I was in love was down in High School at Tulare. She’s married a fellow in the salt business now. I guess she was 117 pretty: anyway, her hair was the color of molasses candy. I wrote a poem to her the first day I saw her.”

“A poem?” asked Eleanor.

“You do well to ask that,” said Bertram, throwing on one of those literary phrases by which, in the midst of his plain, Anglo-Saxon speech, he was recalling that he was a university man. “It rhymed, after a fashion.”

“You don’t know how to be in love until you’re older,” he went on.

(“Even that bay scent brings up only wonder, not emotion; and I can laugh at him all the way,” she thought. Yet in this tiny triumph Eleanor was not entirely happy. The vision, a little disturbing, a little shameful, but yet sweet, was quite gone.)

“Tell me about this girl with the molasses hair. She interests me. And a lot about yourself.”

“Oh, I’ve forgotten most about her long ago. And I’ve something else to remember now, I hope. I’d like to talk about myself, though. I’d like some girl to hear about my ambitions. I really think it would do me good.” 118

He stopped, as though expecting an answer. None came. He bent his eyes closer on her and repeated:

“It would!”

And at that moment, a pair of high heels tapped in the doorway, a cheerful voice called for admission through the portières, and enter Kate Waddington. Mr. Chester, Eleanor saw, rose to her entrance as one who has not always risen for women; there was something premeditated about the movement.

“Mrs. Tiffany said you two were in here,” she began in her full, rich contralto, “and I made so bold, Nell—Mrs. Masters is taking a party over to their ranch next Sunday. One of her men has disappointed her and she’s just telephoned to give me the commission to fill his place. Mr. Chester, you are an inspiration sent straight from Heaven. Any other man, positively any other, would be a second choice—but she didn’t know you when she made up the party, so how could she have invited you?”

She paused and threw an arch look past Eleanor.

“Sure I’ll come!” said Bertram, jarred into 119 the vernacular by his internal emotion of pleasant surprise. “Sure—I’d be delighted.”

“I told Mrs. Masters you’d be the ready accepter,” said Kate.

“You’re going too, aren’t you?” asked Bertram of Eleanor.

“No; I had to decline, I’m sorry to say.”

“And I’m sorry; blame sorry.” He turned back toward Kate Waddington, and she, the lightning-minded, read his expression. He had made a great faux pas; he had seemed more eager toward Eleanor, to whom he owed no gratitude for the invitation, than toward her.

“Would you care to drop in on Mrs. Masters as you go down town to let her know that you are coming? Or if you wish I’ll tell them—I’m going now—that way.” Her tone gave the very slightest hint of pique; her attitude put a suggestion. The game, plain as day to Eleanor, raised up in her only a film of resentment. Mainly, she was enjoying the humor of it.

Bertram rose promptly.

“It is time I was going,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed myself very much, Miss Gray. If 120 you don’t mind, I’d like to come to see you again.”

“And I’ll get into my things,” said Kate.

They all moved toward the door.

Kate passed first; then Eleanor. There hung beside the door-casing a hook, designed to hold the portière cord. Eleanor brushed too close; it caught in the lace at her throat. She pulled up with a jerk, gave a little cry; the lace held fast. She turned—in the wrong direction.

Bertram saw this tiny accident; he sprang forward, caught the lace, disentangled her. And to do so, he must reach about her so that his arms, never quite touching her, yet surrounded her as a circle surrounds its centre. She turned and looked up to thank him, surprised him, surprised herself, in that position.

And a wave which was fear and loathing and longing and agitation ran over her with the speed of an electric current, and left her weak.

Her face, with its own sweet inscrutability, showed little change of expression; but he caught a dullness and then a glitter of her eye, a heave of her bosom, a catch of her breath. As he stood there, his great frame 121 towering above her, something which she feared might be comprehension came into his eyes. And—

“You make a picture—you two there!” called Kate Waddington from without. The transitory expression in his eyes—Eleanor saw it now with triumph—was that of one who has thrown a pearl away. But he followed.

Dining with Mark Heath in the Hotel Marseillaise that night, Bertram fell into a spell of musing, a visible melancholy uncommon in him; for his ill-humors, like his laughters, burned short and violent. Mark Heath—by this time he was growing into a point of view on his chum and room mate—remarked it with some amusement and more curiosity.

Mark was casting about for an opening, when Bertram anticipated him. Staring into the dingy wall of the Hotel Marseillaise, past the laborers, the outcasts, the French cabmen purring over their cabbage soup, he said in a tone of musings:

“When Bert Chester grows up and gets rich, he’ll take unto himself a wife. We’ll live in a big house in the Western Addition with a 122 bay frontage. It will be furnished with dinky old dull stuff, and those swell Japanese prints and paintings. And I’ll have two autos and a toy ranch in the country to play with. We’ll give little dances in the big hall downstairs. I’ll lead the opening dance with the missus, and then I’ll just take a dance or so with the best looking girls—the ones I take a special cotton to. I’ll have my home sweet home dance with the missus—” he fell again to musing.

“A man up a tree,” said Mark Heath, “would say you were in love.”

“I’ll be damned—I wonder if that ain’t the matter?” said Bertram Chester.