He hung of late afternoons over bars, exchanging that brainless but well-willed talk by which men of his sort come to know men. He sat beside roped rings to witness the best muscle of the world--and not the worst brain--revive in ten thousand men the primeval brute. He frolicked with trifling painters, bookless poets, apprentice journalists, and the girls who accrued to all these, through wild studio parties in Latin quarter attics. He sat before the lace, mahogany, crimson lights and cut glass of formal dinners, whereat, after the wine had gone round, his seat became head of the table. From these meetings and revels, whereby he made his way along the path of dalliance in the easiest, most childish, most accepting city of the Western world, two or three kaleidoscopic flashes remained in his maturer memory. The night of the football game, for example, he strayed into the annual pitched battle of noise and reproach at the Yellowstone between the California partisans and the Stanford fanatics. A California graduate, his companion along the cocktail route, recognized him; immediately, he was riding shoulder high. His bearers broke for the sidewalk, and down Market Street he went, a blue-and-gold serpentine dancing behind him. There was his first Jinks at the Bohemian club--an impromptu affair, thrown in between the revelling Christmas Jinks in the clubhouse and the formally artistic Midsummer High Jinks in the Russian River Grove. The Sire, noting his smile and figure, impressed him into service for a small part. This brought a fortnight of rehearsal which was all play and expression of young animal spirits, a night of revel refined by art, an after-jinks dinner of the cast, whereat Bertram, as usual, spoke only to conquer. Memory held also one perfectly-blended winter house-party at the Banks ranch, with the rain swaying the eucalyptus trees outside and a dozen people chosen from San Francisco for their power to entertain, making two nights and a day cheerful within. Later in life, he, the unreflective, thought that times had changed in his city; that men were not so brilliant nor circles so convivial as when he was very young. It was not in him to know that neither times nor men had changed; that he thought so only because he looked on them no longer through the rose glasses of youth.