women as
these--women who preferred cleanliness to display, women who were
nice about their nails and hair. A kind of pleasant shyness crept over
Mark Heath; the spirit came into the face of Bertram Chester. Masters,
tactician that he was, put the conversation into their hands.
Presently, they were telling freely about the fare at Coffee John's,
about their familiars and companions in the little Eddy-Street lodging
house, about the drifters of the Latin quarter. They quite eclipsed
the pale youth who was playing escort to Eleanor, and the substantial
person in the insurance business who seemed to be responsible for Kate
Waddington. Heath, speaking with a little diffidence and lack of
assurance, had twice the wit, twice the eye for things, twice the
illumination of Bertram Chester; yet it was the latter who brought
laughter and attention. His personality, which surrounded him like an
aroma, his smile, his trick of the eyes--one listened to Bertram
Chester.

* * * * *

When the son of Louis brought in the little sweet oranges and arranged
the goblets for black coffee, talk shifted from monologue to dialogue.
Eleanor found herself talking to Bertram. A kind of pride had been
rising in her all the evening; a pride born in recoil from her latest
recollection of him. The episode of that night under the bay tree had
gone with her clear across the Atlantic. Even the influence of the
wholly new environment, in which she had grown from a girl recluse to
a woman, had not served for a long time to erase that ugly stain on
her memory. Here and now was the man who served so to perturb her
once--and she could look on him, with her more mature eyes, as an
attractive, unlicked young cub. She surprised herself taking revenge
upon the past by a hidden patronage. At once, then, she fell to
talking of Europe and the splendors she had lived there.

"This reminds me of the places one slips into abroad," she said, "Mr.
and Mrs. Wark--Lars Wark you know--took me to just such an old ruin in
Paris. We dined for thirty centimes, I remember, but it was no better
than this. I've had to go away to know my native city. That is the
thing which strikes you when you come back--San Francisco is so like
the Latin cities of Europe, and yet so unlike!"

Kate leaned across her insurance man.

"The Society for the Narration of European Travel is in session, Mr.
Chester," she said. "I know the joy that Eleanor is