“You little goose,” he said softly, “don’t you know I think more of you than I do of any one in San Francisco? It’s getting dark; take my arm till we get to the car.” She did so and they moved forward. “Or anywhere else,” he murmured. CHAPTER III RETROSPECT “Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”--THE ACTS. After he had put Mariposa on her car, Essex went down town to the paper with some copy. He was making a fair living on _The Trumpet_, and the work he was doing suited him. He thought it might last the winter and he had no objections to passing the winter in San Francisco. Like many of his kind, he felt the lazy Bohemian charm of the diverse, many-colored, cosmopolitan city sprawled on its sand dunes. The restaurants alone made life more worth while than anywhere else in the country except New York. To-night he went to one, for dinner, that stood in Clay Street, a short distance below Kearney. He had a word to say to the white-clothed chef, who cooked the dinner in plain sight, on a small oven and grill, beneath which the charcoal gleamed redly. He stopped for a moment’s badinage with the buxom, fresh-faced French woman who sat at the desk. She was the chef’s wife, Madame Bertrand, and liked “Monsieur Esseex,” who spoke her natal tongue as well as she did. There was evidently truth in one piece of Essex’s autobiography. Only a childhood spent in France could teach the kind of French he spoke with Madame Bertrand. He sat long over his dinner, smoking and reading the evening papers. It was so late when he left that Bertrand himself came out of his cooking corner and talked with him about Paris. “Monsieur Esseex” knew Paris as well as Bertrand, some parts of it better. He had been educated there at one of the large _lycées_, and had gone back many times, living now on one side of the river, now on the other. Bertrand, in his white cap and apron, conversing with his guest, retained a curious manner of deference unusual in California. “Monsieur is a gentleman of some kind or other,” he told madame. “There are many different kinds of gentlemen in California,” returned that lady, oracularly. It was nearly nine when Essex left the restaurant, and passing down Kearney Street for a few blocks, turned to his right and began to mount the ascending sidewalk that led to his lodgings. These were in an humble and unfashionable neighborhood in Bush Street. The house was of a kind whence gentility has departed. It stood back on the top of two small terraces, up which mounted two wooden flights of stairs, one with a list to starboard so pronounced that Essex had, once or twice, while ascending, thought the city in the throes of an earthquake.