re's nothing in
luck."

"You quitter!"

"All right; but I hate to look cabbage soup in the face," grumbled
Bertram. He resumed, then, his languid occupation which this parley
had interrupted, and continued to review, from an angle of Moe's cigar
stand, the passing matinee parade.

The time was late afternoon of a fog-scented October day. Through the
wet air, street lamps and electric signs had begun to twinkle. Under
the cross-light of retreating day and incandescent globes, the parade
of women, all in bright-colored silks and gauds, moved solid,
unbroken. Opera bags marked off those who had really attended the
matinees; but only one in five wore this badge of sincerity. The rest
had dressed and painted and gone abroad to display themselves just
because it was the fashion in their circles so to dress and paint and
display. Women of Greek perfection in body and feature, free-stepping
Western women who met the gaze of men directly and fearlessly, their
costumes ran through all the exaggerations of Parisian mode and tint.
Toilettes whose brilliancy would cause heads to turn and necks to
crane on the streets of an Eastern city, drew here no tribute of
comment. It had gone on all the afternoon. From the Columbia Theatre
corner, which formed one boundary of "the line," to the Sutler Street
corner of Kearney, five blocks away, certain of these peacocks had
been strutting back and forth since two o'clock. The men who
corresponded in the social organization to these paraders of vanity
lined the sidewalks or lolled in the open-air cigar stands, as did
these two young adventurers in life--Bertram Chester, now a year and a
half out of college, and Mark Heath, cub reporter on the _Herald_.

When the homefarers from office and factory had begun to tarnish the
brilliance of this show, when the women had begun to scatter--this one
to dinner with her man, that one back to the hall-room supper by whose
economies she saved for her Saturday afternoon vanities--Bertram and
Mark drifted with the current up Kearney street toward the Hotel
Marseillaise. In their blood, a little whipped already by the two
cocktails which they had felt able to afford even while they debated
over the price of dinner, ran all the sparkling currents of youth.
They drew on past Sutler Street to Adventurer's Lane, the dingy
section of that street wherein walked the treasure-farers of all the
seven seas; and as they walked, Bertram began to speak of the things
w