Dining with Mark Heath in the Hotel Marseillaise that night, Bertram fell into a spell of musing, a visible melancholy uncommon in him; for his ill-humors, like his laughters, burned short and violent. Mark Heath--by this time he was growing into a point of view on his chum and room mate--remarked it with some amusement and more curiosity. Mark was casting about for an opening, when Bertram anticipated him. Staring into the dingy wall of the Hotel Marseillaise, past the laborers, the outcasts, the French cabmen purring over their cabbage soup, he said in a tone of musings: "When Bert Chester grows up and gets rich, he'll take unto himself a wife. We'll live in a big house in the Western Addition with a bay frontage. It will be furnished with dinky old dull stuff, and those swell Japanese prints and paintings. And I'll have two autos and a toy ranch in the country to play with. We'll give little dances in the big hall downstairs. I'll lead the opening dance with the missus, and then I'll just take a dance or so with the best looking girls--the ones I take a special cotton to. I'll have my home sweet home dance with the missus--" he fell again to musing. "A man up a tree," said Mark Heath, "would say you were in love." "I'll be damned--I wonder if that ain't the matter?" said Bertram Chester. CHAPTER VII The Ferry, doorway to San Francisco, wore its holiday Sunday aspect as Bertram Chester approached it. A Schuetzen Park picnic was gathering itself under the arches, to the syncopated tune of a brass band. The crowd blazed with bright color. The young men, in white caps, yellow sashes of their mysterious fraternity, and tinted neckties like the flowers of spring, lolled and larked and smoked about the pillars. Fat mothers and stodgy fathers fussed over baskets and progeny. Young girls, in white dresses and much trimming of ribbons, coquetted in groups as yet unbroken by the larking young men. Over these ceremonial white dresses of the Sunday picnic, they wore coats and even furs against the damp, penetrating morning--rather late in the season it was for picnics. In the rests of the ragtime, rose the aggressive crackle of that flat, hard accent, with its curious stress on the "r," which would denote to a Californian in Tibet the native of South of Market, San Francisco.