So Bertram Chester went on, the easy familiar of the Tiffany establishment, the contriver of Mrs. Tiffany’s household assistances, and the devoted follower of Eleanor. He never referred in any way to the scene on the restaurant balcony; he did nothing formally to press his suit. Indeed, his occasional air of gentle diffidence puzzled and amused her. She had a queer sense, when she beheld him so, that she liked it in him less than some of his old uncouthness, and only a trifle better than such roughness of the heart as that passage with the Chinese waiter. This new attitude was loose in the back, tight across the shoulders, short in the seams—it was not made to fit Bertram Chester. When he launched out into rudimentary art criticism, stringing together the stock slang which he had picked up in the studios, when he tried to impress her with his refined acquaintance, his progress toward “society” of the conventional kind, her amusement took another turn 196 in the circle of emotion, and became annoyance.

In general company, he reverted to type. At their home dinners, when wine and good fare had lit the fires of his animal spirits, he still told his rambling, half-boastful stories of the cow country and of College times, or laid before these home-stayers the gossip of the town. That manner of his, always more compelling than either his substance or his words, carried the plainest story; and he had at least the art of brevity. One laughed when he laughed, catching from his spirit the humorous idea, even when its expression failed on the tongue. Voice and gesture and an inner appreciation which he could flash instantly to his tongue contributed to these dazzling effects. His new-made friends of the artistic set used to tell him, “If you could only write down your stories—what humor, what action!” Mark Heath, with the information of a room mate, the judging eye of a half-disillusionized friend and the cynicism of a young journalist, was first to perceive that a stenographer concealed to transcribe his talk would get only barren words.

In his fading and declining years, Judge 197 Tiffany leaned more and more upon Eleanor, his business partner. Now it had come spring. The trees were in bud along the Santa Clara. They must begin preparing for the season. The family did not move to the ranch until apricot picking was afoot; but from now on either Judge Tiffany or Eleanor would run down every week to watch the trees and to oversee the Olsen preparations for harvest time. Purchase of supplies and the business of selling last year’s stock, held over for a rise in German prices, kept Eleanor busy.

She dragged the Judge out of his library one March afternoon, that he might inspect with her a new set of sprayers which she was considering. The Judge went to his office all too seldom nowadays; Eleanor and Mrs. Tiffany used continually all kinds of diplomacies to keep him at his business, from which he stubbornly refused to retire. When they had driven their bargain, Eleanor guided and wheedled him to the office. The methodical Attwood, having his man there, thumped a pile of papers down before the Judge, representing that this demurrer must be in on Tuesday, that case tried or continued next 198 week. The Judge sighed as he pulled the papers toward him.

“They’ve nailed me, Nell,” he said. “Here, I’ll appoint a substitute. Send for Mr. Chester, Attwood—dining anywhere, Chester? Then take pot luck with us and pay me by escorting my business conscience home. I’ll overwork myself if someone doesn’t carry her away!”

The afternoon fog, forerunner of another rain, floated in lances above Montgomery Street. The interior valleys had felt their first touch of baking summer, had issued their first call on their cooling plant—the Golden Gate, funnel for mist and rain-winds. The moisture fell in sleety drops; yet only the stranger and pilgrim took protection of raincoat or umbrella. The native knew well enough that it would go no further. On these afternoons, neither cold nor hot, wet nor wholly dry, the blood is champagne and the heart a dancing-floor.

At the moment when Eleanor stepped out into the home-going crowd, she, an instrument tuned to catch delicate vibrations from earth and sea and air, felt all this exhilaration. Life 199 was right; the future was right; the display of a young female creature before the male—that most of all was right. And Bertram Chester, talking for the moment like his old, natural self, was a main eddy in the currents of joy-in-youth.

“You are bonny to-day!” she said quite naturally as she looked him over.

He blushed happily. And the blush helped restore him in her eyes as the natural Bertram Chester.

“And you’re the bonniest of the bonny. I never saw you look so full of ginger except—” he hesitated there, and her words rushed in to meet the emergency.

“Thank you! Though I wasn’t fishing, I am grateful just the same.”

“Then you do find something now and then that you can stand for in me?”

“I find a great deal—when you are Bert Chester.” He seemed to puzzle over this, to ponder it; so that she added:

“Let’s not talk conundrums in this air and this crowd! We’re not blue-nosed, self-searching New Englanders. Let’s keep away from Market Street and walk through the Quarter. They haven’t yet taken the Easter 200 things from the shop windows, and there’s a darling atrocious group of statuary next door to The Fior d’Italia which you must see!” And then, as they turned the corner—

“What’s the crowd? I’m for disremembering that I’m refined. I want to be curious!”

“Looks like a scrap—do you—”

“Nonsense! Come on. I divide women into those who would like to see a prize fight and admit it, and those who would like to see a prize fight and deny it!”

“Gee whiz!” said Bertram. They had reached the edge of the crowd, which circled about some knot of violent struggle and gesture. “Excuse me!” He had sprung from her side and was breaking his way through. By instinct, she followed into the hole back of him, so that she found herself in the second row of spectators to a curious struggle, the details of which flashed in upon her all at once.

Two laborers, gross, tanned, dirty, were fighting. They had swung side-on as the hole opened, and her glance focused itself upon the smaller of the two. He was an old man, quite gray; and down his scalp ran a 201 stream of bright blood which trickled upon his ear. The thing which puzzled her was the action of the older man. He seemed to be hanging to the arms of his younger and sturdier opponent; also he was talking rapidly, excitedly; and she caught only one phrase.

“Hit me with a nail, will you?”

And just then the younger man got his arm free, and dove for the pavement—dove at precisely the same instant with Bertram Chester. Apparently, the younger fighter arrived first; he backed off from the scuffle brandishing a piece of packing box. Then she saw what the old man meant. Pointing the weapon was a nail, stained red.

As this rough fury poised himself for the stroke, she took in the whole picture—a young, tall, brute man, one eye puffing from a new blow, the other blood-shot, the mouth open and dripping, the right arm raised for the murderer’s blow.

Bertram Chester came between as though he had risen out of the earth. His left hand, with a trained aptitude which made the motion seem the easiest thing in the world, caught the upraised wrist. The laborer 202 ripped out an unconsidered oath and struck with his free fist at Bertram’s face. Bertram evaded the blow, slipped in close. And then—in a lightning flash of speed, Bertram’s right hand, which had been resting loosely by his side, shot upward. His whole body seemed to spring up behind it. The blow struck under the point of the chin. The head of the young bruiser dropped, then his shoulders, then his arms; his body sagged down upon Bertram. The champion of age shook him off; he dropped to the sidewalk. All this in a flash, in a wink.

The crowd, curiously inert, as all city crowds are until the leader appears, now followed this leader. A clamor of many tongues arose—“Get a cop!” “He’s killed him!” “Do him up!” A short rush of half a dozen boys toward the fallen bully met the resistance of Bertram, who had turned as though anticipating such a movement. He shoved them back and raised his hand. His eyes were bright, his face flushed, and that smile which won and commanded men had broken out on his lips.

“Say,” he said, “you all saw me do this 203 man fair and square. He isn’t dead. He’s only put out. He’ll be all right in five minutes. You know it was coming to him. Now, I’ve got a lady with me, and I don’t want her dragged into the police station. The cops will be here in a minute. I’d like to show this thing up in court, but we don’t want to trouble the lady, do we? If I beat it, how many of you will witness to the cops just what happened?”

“I!” and “I!” and “I!” from the crowd and “Me! God bless ye!” from the elder warrior, who stood wiping the blood from his ear. Bertram gave them no chance for reconsideration. “All right!” he said, “here I go!” He pushed his way out as he pushed it in, swept Eleanor along with him. The spectators lifted a cheer; but only a mob of small boys followed.

“Beat it, kids, or the bulls will pipe me!” called Bertram over his shoulder. At this magic formula, the boys fell out. A half a block away, Eleanor dared look back. A policeman had just arrived; he was clubbing his way stupidly through the crowd. Bertram looked back too. 204

“All right,” he announced, “now don’t appear to hurry.” At Kearney Street, he swung her aboard an electric car.

“Victory!” she cried as the conductor rang his two bells and the car gathered headway. “It was perfect!”

He stared down at her.

“Well, I just had to put it through once I got started, but say—I thought you’d sure be sore on me.” His voice took on an apologetic tone. “It seems to me when I see a scrap, I constitutionally can’t keep out of it.”

“No more should you—such fights as that.”

“Then you make distinctions?” he asked.

“If you mean that I distinguish between fighting just for the lust of it and fighting to protect the helpless, I may say that I do. You did well.”

“Thank you!” he said, half-earnestly. “I’d have thought you wouldn’t like to see me muss things up, that way.” He was letting his voice slip away from him, both in volume and in manner, and the car was crowded. A panic necessity for concealment took possession of her.

“Surely we’ve evaded the police—let’s get out and have our walk through the Quarter.” 205

“I’m with you.” Kearney Street, that thoroughfare which gathered into its two miles every element in American life, here struck its hill rise. Sheer above them hung Telegraph Hill, attained by latticed sidewalks, half stairs. The Latin quarter thronged and played all about them in the dusk and the fresh lamplight. And again, mood and spirits rose in her. The event whose swift, kaleidoscopic action still danced on her retina, the very stimulus of brutal youth in action, had conspired with the perfect night to raise her above herself.

“Oh, talk to me about it!” she said. “How did you do it—what do you call it—I want to hear you tell about it.”

“I guess you saw it all—just a plain uppercut. Those blame city crowds would see a man killed before they’d think of anything but the show. I’ve always said that, and now I know it. I caught sight of the old man side-on and I saw he was hurt by something more than a punch. Far be it from me to spoil a good scrap, but that wasn’t a fair shake. So I dropped you and started in. And then I saw that nail. I made a slip there,” he let his voice fall in self-depreciation—“I should 206 have kicked that chunk of board away, instead of diving for it. He beat me to it. The rest was so easy it was a shame to take the money. Up comes his head and up comes my guard”—he stopped in the street to illustrate—“and he couldn’t use his club any more than a kitten. I’d have let him go, if he hadn’t hit at me—and clipped me. For a second, I could have bit nails in two. When I pulled myself in close, there was his chin just above me—a be-auty target. And an uppercut was his medicine.” Bertram jerked his right hand up from his hip to illustrate the uppercut. Then he screwed up his face and felt of his right shoulder. “He marked me some,” he said in explanation.

“Did he hurt you?” she asked with real concern. It ran into her mind that the conventional hero of romance makes his wound a scratch before his lady. If she expected that from Bertram Chester, he disillusionized her.

“Well, you don’t take a punch like that, even glancing on your shoulder, without something getting loose,” he replied. “I shouldn’t be surprised if I’d slipped a cog or a tendon or something.”

“Why—let’s go home and see about it.” 207

“Oh, it isn’t bad enough for that!” Then he fell into reminiscences. In their toilsome passage up the hen-coop sidewalks of Broadway, he gesticulated—with constrained motions of his right arm—loosed the sparkle of his energetic, magnetic talk upon her. She drew close to him. Gradually, as the steps became steep, her hand slipped under his arm. She was only half-conscious of this motion; her consciousness was full of a softening toward him, a leaning upon that strength which she had seen in action. On his side, he did not fail to notice it—this first movement in her which had seemed like an advance. He stopped his buzz of talk at one moment and all the lines of his face relaxed as though he were about to say something softer and deeper. But he only caught his breath and changed to another story. He had remembered—and just in time, he thought—the advice of Kate Waddington.

But in spite of that remembrance, he permitted himself the luxury of being natural; and he talked continually until they were within the Tiffany doors.

Mrs. Tiffany must hear all about it from both of them. When they came to the hero’s 208 injury, she dismissed Eleanor, made him strip his massy shoulder, and got out her pet liniment. The Judge, coming home in the midst of these surgical cares, heard the story retold with heroic additions by his wife. Dinner that night was a merry, a happy, an intimate party.

When Bertram left, Mrs. Tiffany did not follow him to the door, as was her old-fashioned custom. He waited a moment, as though expecting something. His eyes were on Eleanor. She did not move. She only bade him a simple and easy good night over her shoulder.

The old couple sat for a long time before the fire. Eleanor was gone—not to bed, could they but have known it, but to sit by her window and breathe bay-fragrance and drink the foggy night air off the Gate.

The Judge smiled down on that faded daintiness at his feet.

“Are we now to consider him in the light of a nephew-in-law?” he asked.

“It has bothered me a good deal,” said Mattie Tiffany. “What do you think I ought to do?”

“If that frightful social responsibility of 209 yours drives you to anything,” responded the Judge, “I should say you’d best leave it alone.”

“But Edward, dear, I’m just like a mother to her—and goodness knows I haven’t always been the best of mothers. There was her father—you know how long I shirked that—”

“The sin of omission that you will carry to your grave—”

“And somehow this is so like Billy Gray! It was just this way in her mother’s case. When Billy came around—you remember how bonny a boy he was then, Edward—I, her own sister, could never tell how she felt toward him. I’ve always told you that Eleanor has slipped a generation. She’s her grandmother, not her mother, in mind. But she’s just like her mother in one thing. You can’t ever tell what she’s thinking about, and the deeper her thoughts go the harder it is to tell! That’s why I’m considering all this so carefully—she doesn’t commit herself in one way or the other. It’s a sign.”

“Knowing you, Mattie, I presume that you’ve conducted researches into his desirability as a nephew-in-law?”

“Well, shouldn’t I? Goodness knows, we don’t lead a conventional life in this family, 210 and I don’t chaperone her. I reproach myself a little with that. When Mrs. Goodyear wanted to take her up and put her into the Fortnightly, it wasn’t so much Eleanor’s disinclination as my own laziness about getting up gowns and paddling about paying calls which kept me back—and that’s God’s truth.”

“And these penitential exercises in detective work—what have they brought forth?”

“He’s a little careless morally, I think. He’s had too much conviviality about the Club. I’m afraid he’s blossoming over young. They can say all they want about wild oats, but in this city it’s a mistake to sow them all at once. That’s one reason why I’ve been so good to him. I flatter myself that a house like this is a moral influence on him.”

“It’s all a concern for his soul with you, then?”

“No. Frankly, I like him. Everyone likes him. He’s a dear. But as to Eleanor—”

The Judge had risen and taken off his skull cap.

“Well, she has run a ranch and she’s travelled alone to Europe and back, and she’s 211 saved the soul if not the body of a father. And I wonder whether a girl who’s all that to her credit can’t be trusted to deal with the problem of an undesirable though attractive young man—”

“If I were only sure he was undesirable!”

“It is according,” responded the Judge, “to your definition of undesirability. If you mean worldly circumstances, you needn’t fear for Bertram Chester. He resigns from my firm this month.”

“What for?”

“Attwood brought me news of it. I don’t know where he’s going. I’m not supposed to know anything. But for to get rich, for one thing.” He closed his book and restored it to its place on the shelves. “He took the left-hand road, you see. It was manifest destiny; and you and I and Eleanor cannot move one whit the career of that young man.”