Bert Chester, waiting before Zinkand’s an hour later, picked her a block away from the nooning crowd. Before he recognized the olive-green tailor suit which he had come to know, he noticed the firm yet gracile move of her. As she came nearer, he was aware of two loungers waiting, like himself, to keep appointments. He caught this exchange from them:
“Who? The girl in a kind of brownish green?”
“Yes. Isn’t she a peach?”
Just then, it seemed to him, did the purely physical charm of her burst upon him for the first time. Supple and swaying, yet plump and round; her head set square with some of a man’s strength, on exquisitely sloping shoulders: and the taste—he would have called it so—of her dress! A discriminating woman might have noticed that her costume bordered 181 on ostentatious unostentation. For it was designed in every detail to frame the picture, to set off not only that figure but also the cream of her skin, the tawny hair, even those firm, plump hands.
He found himself remembering that he had just proposed to another girl. The thought flashed in, and flashed out as quickly.
The Café Zinkand formed, at the time, a social nodule in the metropolitan parish that San Francisco was. As the Palace Hotel was its Rialto, gathering-place for prosperous adventure, so the Zinkand was its bourne. In this mahoganied and mirrored restaurant with its generous fare, its atmosphere of comfortable extravagance, those who made the city go, who gave its peculiar Saxon-Latin move and glitter, were accustomed to gather and gossip. It blazed with special splendor on the nights when this or that “Eastern attraction” showed at the Columbia Theatre. To stand on such evenings at the Powell Street terminus, to watch those tripping, gaily-dressed, laughing Californian women thronging the belt of city light from the theatre canopy to the restaurant canopy—ah, that was 182 San Francisco! Not Paris, not Buenos Ayres—they say who have travelled far—could show such a procession of Dianaides, such a Greek festival of joy in the smooth, vigorous body and the things which feed and clothe it. With that absence of public conventionality which was another ear-mark of the old city, all sorts and conditions of men and women sat side by side at the tables. Harlots, or those who might well pass as such, beside the best morale there is in women; daughters of washerwomen beside daughters of such proud blood as we have; bookmakers’ wives, blazing with the jewels which will be pawned to-morrow, beside German housewives on a Saturday night revel; jockies and touts from the race tracks beside roistering students from Stanford and Berkeley; soldiers of fortune blown in by the Pacific winds, taking their first intoxicating taste of civilization after their play with death and wealth, beside stodgy burghers grown rich in real estate; clerks beside magnates—all united in the worship of the body.
At noon, however, its workaday aspect was on; it was no more than a lunching place. Chester and Kate found seats in a retired corner. 183
She looked him over with cool mischief while she drew off her gloves and let one white hand, still creased in pink with the pressure of the seams, drop toward him on the table.
“I am not exactly to congratulate you,” she said, “but for a man who was turned down last night you don’t seem exactly unhappy.”