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 studio. The intellectual centre of San Francisco shifted to that garret; the gay, the witty and the brilliant still followed wherever Alice Gray might go. Billy, a type of the journalist in the time when journalism meant the careless life, left her a great deal alone after the honeymoon. On his side, there was no conscious neglect in this; on her side, there was no reproach. It was just their way of living. He adored her with a quiet, steady flame of affection which was too fine to degenerate into mere uxoriousness. Already, he was a little too fond of his liquor--a peccadillo which attracted little attention in that age of the careless city. This troubled Alice Gray less than it would have troubled her mother. In the periods when she pulled herself up, she worried to think how little she did care about it. In fact, his remorseful recovery from his debauches had become her occasion for pouring out upon him the mother in her. She reveled guiltily in this singular sacrament of her singular love.