he fame of the successful in San Francisco, used to
play ingenious jokes upon it. O'Ryan was possibly the only man of any
time who could draw the sting of a practical joke.

They dwelt, twin-regnant over this world of theirs, in sisterly
harmony. Stallard declared always that a final gift of fate and the
gods preserved them to harmony: their tastes in men differed. They had
choice enough, God wot--poets and novelists struggling on the verge of
fame; attractive, irresponsible, magnetic journalists, destined never
to arrive anywhere, but following a flowery path along which a woman
might smile; sons of new-rich millionaires who followed and backed and
corrupted the artists of that budding Paris which never blossomed; two
painters, among many, who got both fame and wealth before they were
done.

In his later years, one asked Tyson the English novelist, connoisseur
of women if there ever was one, whom he esteemed the prettiest and
whom the wittiest among the women he had known and studied.

"For wit, Lady Vera Loudon," he said, "and after her, a quite
remarkable woman I met in San Francisco out on the West Coast of
America--of all places." Tradition has enlarged this reply to make
Matilda Sturtevant his prettiest as Alice was his wittiest.

Matilda's fresh beauty of the devil, her full yet delicate beauty of
the twenties and early thirties, live in the galleries of Europe. The
painters all had their try at her; she lived in creation which ran the
line between miniatures and heroic canvases. Lars Wark, perhaps the
least considered of all her painter friends, is the one that triumphed
most of all. Who does not know his Launcelot and Enid? The Enid, of a
beauty so intelligent, so wistful and so good--she is Matilda
Sturtevant, hardly idealized.

These twin graces married within two years of each other. Of course,
they chose strangely. Matilda, whose beauty might have graced the head
of the table in any one of three gaudy mansions on Nob Hill, chose
Edward C. Tiffany, attorney, politician in a small but honorable way,
man about town--and much older than she. Alice, following quietly,
accepted Billy Gray, journalist--a clever reporter with no
possibilities beyond that; a gentleman, it is true, and a man of
likeable disposition, but on the whole the least desirable of all her
followers.

Billy and Alice Gray lived out the three years which were all they
ever had of matrimony, in a Latin quarter garret, transformed into a