"Yes," Mr. Payson's voice was almost inaudible. He pushed his chair back, rose and went into the library. Clytie followed him.
"Are you going out to-night, father?"
"Yes, I've got some business to attend to."
"In the evening?" she raised her brows.
"Oh, I'm only looking up something—for my book." He turned away to avoid her gaze.
"Oh!" She sat down and took up a book without questioning him further. Soon after, the front doorbell rang and Mr. Cayley was shown in by the Chinese servant.
Blanchard Cayley was well known about town, for he had a place in many different coteries. By his birth he inherited a position in a select Southern set that had long monopolized social standing and looked scornfully down upon the upstart railroad aristocracy and that nouveau riche element which was prominent chiefly through the notoriety conferred by the newspapers. Blanchard Cayley's parts gained him the entrée, besides, to less conventional circles, where his wit and affability made him a favorite. He belonged to two of the best clubs, but his inclinations led him to dine usually at French or Italian restaurants, where good-fellowship and ability distinguished the company. He wrote a little and knew the best newspaper men and all the minor poets in town. He drew a little, and was familiar with all the artists. He accounted himself a musical critic and cultivated composers. He knew San Francisco like a rat, knew it as he knew the intricacies of French forms of verse, as well as he knew the architecture of music and the history of painting. He had long ceased his nocturnal meanderings "down the line" from the Hoffman Bar to Dunn's saloon, but he occasionally took a post-graduate course, of sorts, to see whether, for the nonce, the city was wide open or shut. He had discovered the Latin Quarter, now well established as a show-place for jaded pleasure-seekers, and had played bocce with the Italians in the cellars of saloons, before the game was heard of by Americans. He had found the marionette theater in its first week, traced every one of Stevenson's haunts before the Tusitala had died in Samoa, knew the writings of "Phoenix" almost by heart, and had devoured half the Mercantile Library. Tar Flat and the Barbary Coast he knew as well as the Mission and North Beach, and as for Chinatown, he had ransacked it for queer jars, jade and hand-made jewelry, exhausting its possibilities long before San Franciscans had realized the presence, in that quarter, of anything but an ill-smelling purlieu of tourists' bazaars.
He had "discovered" women as well—women, for the most part, whose attractions few other persons seemed to appreciate. His last find was Clytie Payson—a much more valuable tribute to his taste than any heretofore. He had devoted himself assiduously to her, and it was his boast that he could remember the hat she wore when he first saw her, ten years before. His pursuit of her had been eccentric. Cayley was mathematical and his methods were built upon a system. During the first years of their acquaintance he alternated months of neglect with picturesque arrivals on nights so tempestuous and foul that his presence would be sure to be counted as a flattering tribute, and would outweigh, with his obvious devotion, the previous languor of his pursuit. This was a fair sample of the subtlety of his psychological amours, for Blanchard Cayley was not of the temperament to run across the room and kiss a girl with verve and ardor. He led, however, an intense mental life; there he was a creature of enthusiasms and contempts, capable of no intermediate emotion.
What else was true of his character it would be necessary to determine from the several ladies of his choice whom he kept carefully apart, recipients of his subdivided confidence. Blanchard Cayley did not introduce female contemporaries.
He wore a carefully trimmed, reddish, Vandyke beard, with a drooping mustache; his hair curled a bit effeminately. Large blue eyes, the well-developed nose of the hobbyist, hands of a sixteenth-century gentleman, aristocratic, well-kept, soft. To-night he was in half-dress—dinner jacket and gold studs, an inch wide stripe upon his trousers—this under a yellow mackintosh and cricket cap, in strict accordance with his own ideas of form.