ses--life's a dead easy game out here--when you don't develop too
much ambition. Ambition? Nothing in that. Fellows are ingrates and
idiots that go off to a cold-blooded place like New York, with a beastly
climate, the moment they have made a little mark here. No philosophy in
ambition. Only one life. Why not enjoy it--when your creditors will let
you? And the money always comes somehow--comes easy, goes easy, and if
we can't all be great, we can be happier here than anywhere else on
earth. Here's to San Francisco--and perdition to him that calls it
'Frisco!"

"So you have said good-bye to ambition?" asked Isabel, curiously. "I
used to think you had a good deal."

"So I had. Once I was younger and knew less. Perhaps if I had ever done
anything cleverer than a few dashing skits for the Bohemian Club, and
somebody had patted me hard enough on the back, I might have made an ass
of myself and crossed the continent in the wake of so many that have
never been heard of since."

"I don't think you ever gave your creativeness a real chance. If you had
shut yourself up in the country for a year--"

"I should have stayed a week. Scenery on a drop curtain is all I want of
nature. No, Isabel." He relapsed into sadness for a moment. "I have
travelled the logical road and simmered down into my place. It's just
this: San Francisco breeds all sorts. A few are born with a drop of
iron in their souls. They resist the climate, and the enchantment of the
easy luxurious semi-idle life you can command out here on next to
nothing, and clear out, and work hard, and make little old California
famous. Where they get the iron from God knows. It's all electricity
with the rest of us. There are hundreds of my sort. You've seen them at
the real Bohemian restaurants; young men mad with life and the sense of
their own powers; all of them writing, painting, composing,
editing--mostly talking. Then at other tables the old-young men who
have shrugged their shoulders and simmered down like myself; lucky if
they haven't taken to drink or drugs to drown regrets. Still other
tables--the young-old men, quite happy, and generally drunk. Business
men and some professional are the only ones that forge steadily ahead;
with precious few exceptions. But you don't see them often in the cheap
Bohemian restaurants, which have a glamour for the young, and are a
financial necessity for the failures. Never was such a high percentage
of brains in any one city. But they